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US market indices drop on concerns

10 March 2009 09:25 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Vahab Rzayev - APA-Economics. Investors fixated on the faltering economy brushed off the type of merger news that normally starts rallies, AP reported.
Wall Street fell more than 1 percent Monday as uneasiness about the economy eclipsed a bounce in troubled financial stocks and news of a big drug company merger. Stocks rose in the early going but turned lower in a now familiar pattern where short-lived bursts of optimism give way to concerns about the country’s economic woes.
The market is also skeptical of Washington’s efforts to help the financial industry and the overall economy with spending and tax cuts. And so the Dow Jones industrials haven’t managed to put together two consecutive winning sessions since Feb. 5-6.
The Dow fell 79.89, or 1.2 percent, to 6,547.05.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 6.85, or 1 percent, to 676.53, while the Nasdaq composite index fell 25.21, or 2 percent, to 1,268.64.
The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 7.79, or 2.2 percent, to 343.26.
About five stocks fell for every two that rose on the New York Stock Exchange, where consolidated volume came to 6.21 billion shares, compared with 7.21 billion shares on Friday.
Both the Dow and the S&P 500 have fallen more than 25 percent this year. The Dow is at its lowest level since the spring of 1997, and the S&P 500 is at its lowest point since the fall of 1996. The Nasdaq, meanwhile, is at a six-year low.
The dollar mostly rose against other major currencies, while gold prices fell.
Light, sweet crude for April delivery rose $1.55 to settle at $47.07 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Overseas markets ended mixed after the World Bank forecast that the global economy will shrink this year for the first time since World War II. Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell 1.2 percent, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index dropped 4.8 percent. Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 0.3 percent, Germany’s DAX index rose 0.7 percent, and France’s CAC-40 fell 0.6 percent.