Stocks Stumble Into Bear Market Territory
UPDATED, 4:05 p.m. ET: Worries over high inflation continued to weigh on Wall Street Monday, as financial markets extended their slide and the S&P 500 crossed a key bear-market indicator.
The S&P 500 index, which comprises 500 large public U.S. companies, closed down 3.87% in regular trading. Year to date, the index currently is off 21.8%, surpassing the 20% threshold that is the unofficial signal of a bear market.
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The broad sell-off — with every stock in the S&P 500 dropping Monday — comes after the U.S. experienced its highest rate of inflation in May 2022 in four decades. The Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 2.79%, shedding 874.73 points in Monday trading, and the tech-centric Nasdaq Composite Index fell 4.68%.
Media and tech stocks were sucked down in the market drop, with Monday’s losers including Paramount Global (-8.1%), Disney (-3.7%), Netflix (-7.2%), and Warner Bros. Discovery (-5.6%).
Shares of Live Nation Entertainment dropped 8%, and the stock is down 30% year to date. Tech shares sliding in Monday trading included Apple (-3.8%), Amazon (-5.5%), Meta Platforms (-6.4%) Alphabet (-4.1%) and Twitter (-5%).
The steep market drops in 2022 have wiped out billions of dollars in market value. Netflix has shed about $190 billion in market capitalization (to currently around $75.4 billion). Disney’s market cap is about $174 billion today, a loss of some $110 billion year to date. Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has seen its market value a little more than halved this year, to around $444.5 billion.
Investors are expecting the Federal Reserve to announce Wednesday that it will raise interest rates more aggressively than the half-point hike that was previously signaled, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Labor Department on Friday, June 10, reported the fastest annual increase in the consumer-price index in May 2022 — up 8.6% compared with a year earlier — since 1981.
Cryptocurrency values are also crashing, with Bitcoin hitting an 18-month low and dropping 17% since December 2020, per Bloomberg.
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