Fears of slowing U.S. growth jolt markets around the world

Anxiety over a slowdown in the U.S. economy intensified Monday, with a retreat in markets that began last week snowballing into a global rout.

The turmoil was the latest example of how distinct economic forces can ricochet across markets, forcing down company stock prices and erasing billions of dollars in value. In this case, a rapidly rising yen over the past week had disrupted the flow of global capital, prompting a pullback from some popular investments.

But the sell-off quickly expanded into a more widespread panic that the Federal Reserve may have waited too long to start cutting interest rates, threatening the strength of the U.S. economy.

Those fears were amplified by a U.S. employment report released Friday that showed significantly slower hiring by employers, with the unemployment rate rising to its highest level in nearly three years. From the moment stock markets first opened for trading in Asia, and then through trading hours in Europe and the United States on Monday, prices plummeted.

On Wall Street, the S&P 500 fell 3%, its sharpest daily decline since September 2022.

While some investors saw the sell-off as a signal that the economy was at risk of recession, others maintained that the move was more the result of a pullback from overextended bets, especially on tech stocks and artificial intelligence. Despite its recent decline, the S&P 500 is still up nearly 9% for the year, a healthy return.

“Markets are a little bit out of control,” said Andrew Brenner, head of international fixed income at National Alliance Securities. “This is just total panic. It’s not real but it is painful, and it could be with us for a few weeks.”

Few corners of the financial market were spared from the turmoil as investors cashed out and sought refuge from a broad-based slump. Oil futures, gold and cryptocurrencies were also swept up in the turmoil. A number of big technology stocks — which have sway over the market because of their size — tumbled, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index fell about 3.4%. In Europe, the pan-European Stoxx index fell 2.2%.

The selling was especially pronounced in Japan, where worries about the state of the economy there were compounded by concerns about the effects of a rapidly strengthening yen. The Nikkei 225 index dropped 12.4% Monday, the benchmark index’s biggest one-day point decline, larger than the plunge during the Black Monday crash in October 1987.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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