A sell-off for stocks wrapped around the world and hit Wall Street on Tuesday, while oil prices climbed even higher on worries about the widening war with Iran. But the big moves that rocked markets in the morning eased substantially as the day progressed, the AP reports.
- The S&P 500 fell 64.99 points, or 0.9%, to 6,816.63. The index had been down as much as 2.5% in the morning because of worries that the war may do more sustained damage to the economy than feared.
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 403.51 points, or 0.8%, to 48,501.27, having plunged more than 1,200 earlier.
- The Nasdaq composite fell 232.17 points, or 1%, to 22,516.69, also paring its loss from earlier.
It was just a day earlier that US stocks opened the morning with a sharp loss, only to recover all of it and end the day with a tiny gain. Helping to support the market was a record showing that past wars and conflicts in the Middle East did not usually mean long-term pain for US stocks. But that was with the caveat that oil prices did not jump too high, like above $100 per barrel. On Tuesday, oil prices rose again and raised more alarms. The price for a barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, briefly leaped above $84. The jump lessened through the day, though, which helped moderate the losses for stocks. Brent settled at $81.40, up 4.7%. A barrel of benchmark US crude rose 4.7% to $74.56.
Tuesday's climb for oil prices came after Iran struck the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia, part of a widening of targets that also includes areas critical to the world's oil and natural gas production. Worries are particularly high about the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran, a narrow passageway where roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes. Iranian Brig. Gen. Ebrahim Jabbari, an adviser to the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, vowed that any ships that passed through the strait would be set on fire. The fears about oil prices ebbed a bit later in the day as President Trump said the US Navy could begin escorting tankers through the strait, "if necessary," to "ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD."
On Wall Street, nearly three out of every four stocks within the S&P 500 dropped. Unlike a day before, influential Big Tech stocks weren't able to prop up indexes, and Nvidia fell 1.3%. Among the winners on Wall Street was Target, which rose 6.7% after the retailer reported a better profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.
- Tuesday's sell-off started in Asia, where the Kospi stock index in South Korea, a big energy importer, plunged 7.2%. That was its worst day since two summers ago as markets reopened after a holiday on Monday. It had been setting records recently. Tokyo's Nikkei 225 dropped 3.1%, even as analysts said Japan has a sizable stockpile lasting more than 200 days. In Europe, where prices for natural gas have soared because of the war, France's CAC 40 lost 3.5%.
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