Stocks Sink on Growing Worries

The markets had a rough day on Thursday, but the damage wasn't as bad as feared. The Dow fell 259 points to 34,421, the S&P fell 37 points to 4,320, and the Nasdaq fell 105 points to 14,559. All the losses were under 1%. Before the opening bell, Dow futures were down nearly 500 points for a slew of reasons, including fears that the fast-spreading Delta variant was slowing the world recovery. (Exhibit A: Japan just banned fans from the Olympics.) Bond yields also continued to fall, a sign that investors are growing increasingly anxious about the strength of the recovery, per the AP.

“What you're seeing now is risk aversion as uncertainty and fear starts to take over,” Christopher Harvey of Wells Fargo Securities tells the Wall Street Journal. “You have less liquidity because of the holiday weekend, you have a pre-earnings period where basically everything is quiet, and everyone turns to the macro [landscape], which isn’t great. And there is no indication that the slide in bond yields is going to abate in the short term.” Also on Thursday, the Labor Department reported that jobless claims increased by 2,000 from the previous week to 373,000. (More stock market stories.)