WALL Street suffered the largest one-day collapse in history on Monday, triggering the Asian markets to crash, followed by the European and the UK markets yesterday.
When the US Dow Jones re-opened yesterday afternoon (New York time 9:30am) the US stocks dropped even further by another 2.1%, losing 500 points.
A drop of that magnitude is big, down 10.8% from its all-time high.
When the crash began on Monday US stocks plummeted almost 1,200 points, so the two days combine to a loss of 1,700 points.
The losses spread to Asia, where Hong Kong’s Hang Seng plunged 5.12% and Japan’s Nikkei lost 4.73%, and then went global with Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 losing 3.2%.
Japan’s share index then collapsed further overnight. By yesterday morning some had lost as much as 7%.
Both Germany’s and France’s stock markets fell sharply with losses of up to 3%, before recovering some ground.
Yesterday morning, as the markets opened in London, stocks dived by 3.5% in the first few minutes of trade.
By mid-morning the London stock market had recovered slightly to losses of 2%.
The pound also fell again yesterday. It was 0.7% lower against the dollar at $1.3859, and 0.5% lower against the euro at 1.1228.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin continued its collapse after a big fall on Monday. Yesterday its ‘value’ had fallen below $6,000, after more banks banned their customers from buying the crypto-currency on credit card.
The price fell to $5,947.40 (£4,256.44) yesterday, according to a price index run by news website Coindesk.
Bitcoin reached its peak in November 2017, when it hit $19,000, and then began to fall steadily from mid-December.
Several major banks including J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citi group in the US, and Lloyds and Virgin Money in the UK banned customers from using credit cards to purchase the digital currency.
