Virus fear hits Wall Street hard | Financial

The Dow Jones index closed the session with a loss of 3.4 percent at 26,519.95 points. The broad S&P 500 fell 3.5 percent to 3271.03 points and technology gauge Nasdaq lost 3.7 percent to 11,004.87 points.

Lockdown measures are being tightened in various countries to prevent the virus from spreading. In addition, oil stocks increased, further fueling concerns about the crisis. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hopes that falling stock prices will force the Trump administration to agree to a new corona support package that has been under negotiation for a long time.

General Electric (GE) surprised with better than expected results. The industrial group mainly succeeded in sharply reducing the net loss compared to a year earlier. That was rewarded at the fair with a plus of 4.5 percent.

Microsoft again benefited greatly from working from home due to the corona crisis. As a result, companies purchased more online services, but also invested more money in renting space in the cloud to run their own software. However, the company’s outlook is on the cautious side. Partly because of this, the share lost more than 5 percent.

Boeing was lowered by 4.6 percent. The aircraft manufacturer is likely to cut thousands of additional jobs as a result of the very difficult market conditions in the aviation sector due to the corona crisis. Other companies that opened the books were credit card company Mastercard (minus 8.1 percent), parcel delivery company UPS (minus 8.8 percent) and automaker Fiat Chrysler (minus 4.9 percent).

Telecom giant AT&T was also in the spotlight after rumors that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, would be interested in an acquisition of CNN. That news channel is still part of AT&T, which lost 1.6 percent in stock market value. Amazon lost 3.8 percent.

The euro was worth $ 1.1745, compared to $ 1.1758 at the close of the European stock markets earlier in the day. A barrel of American oil cost 5.7 percent less at $ 37.31. Brent oil fell 5.2 percent in price to $ 39.05 a barrel.

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