2008-01-22

$100bn Lost

From the department of if-you-find- it-please-return-it-to-the-ASX:
It has been a day of carnage on the Australian share market, with investors wiping nearly $100 billion off the value of local stocks.

The market has closed down 7.3 per cent - its worst one-day fall since 1989.

Today, investors took their cue from Asia and Europe, where the FTSE fell more than 5.5 per cent.

Wall Street was closed for a public holiday, and there are fears about what is to come when it reopens tonight.

The plunges comes on the back of new fears the US economic slowdown is spreading across the world.

The All Ordinaries dived 409 points to 5,222 and the ASX 200 slumped 394 points to 5,187.

No sectors have been secure from the hammering.

The miners have been deeply in the red on lower base metals prices. Rio Tinto shed 11.6 per cent to $101.

BHP Billiton dropped 6.9 per cent to $31.

As for the financial sector, the ANZ suffered a 7.1 per cent loss to $24.35.

It has been such a volatile day that the website of Australia's largest online sharebroker CommSec crashed after being overloaded with an unprecedented number of trades on the site as the market opened.
I am looking forward in all my supervillain glee to the response from Wall Street. A 7% drop? Not likely. Somewhere between 3-4% is my guess. And that's not a prediction.

1 comment:

BLBeamer said...

That bridge pictured is not too far from my house. My maternal grandfather was the first city employee to cross the new, replacement bridge (which is still standing). The pictured collapse happened in the 1930's.

The original bridge was referred to as Galloping Gertie.