At the closing bell on Tuesday, the Dow Jones was down by 410.32 points, a 1.84% fall to 21,917.16. The S&P 500 index was down by 42.06 points, a 1.6% decline to 2,584.59, and the Nasdaq Composite ended at 7,700.10, a 0.95% fall by 74.05 points.
While not as dramatic as the losses seen in previous weeks, stock indices have continued to fall as new bad news filters in, including a 14% jump in COVID-19 cases in New York state overnight and reported losses by big banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America.
“There’s still a huge amount of uncertainty right now," Shawn Snyder, head of investment strategy at Citi Personal Wealth Management, told the Wall Street Journal. "Is this a V-shaped recovery, or is this something that lingers and lasts longer than we thought?”
Tuesday was the end of the first quarter of fiscal year 2020, and the day’s losses helped make it among worst ever recorded, despite some strong market rallies last week, according to CNBC. The Dow Jones has lost 22% of its value since January 1, the worst loss in its entire 135-year history, and the S&P 500 lost 19.6% of its value, its worst first quarter since 2008.
“Last week’s double-digit gain for markets was a welcome relief rally, though market bottoms are rarely as clean as this one has been,” Mark Hackett, Nationwide’s chief of investment research, told CNBC Tuesday. “Markets will need to reflect more traditional interactions before confidence in a bottom can be reached.”
Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned on Friday that the world economy had entered a recession, but noted that a “sizable rebound” would likely follow the crisis in 2021.
