The Dow Jones declined 7.8 percent on Monday, its largest drop since the financial crisis, and oil prices fell 25 percent, their worst day since the 1991 Gulf War, as markets responded to the rapid increase in coronavirus cases around the world.
The stock market nearly fell into a bear market, which would have meant the official end of the 11-year bull market run of rising stocks that began on March 9, 2009, according to the Washington Post. So far, the Dow has lost more than 19 percent since its mid-February record high. A 20-percent drop from the all-time high would make it a bear market.
Recreation stocks generally fared worse overall than Wall Street, with Thor Industries dropping 25 percent even after reporting strong revenue in the second quarter on Monday.
Brunswick Corp. stocks were down 13.82 percent on Monday. Winnebago, which manufactures Chris-Craft Boats, plummeted 21.3 percent, and Polaris was down 16.7 percent, according to SeekingAlpha news editor Clark Schultz.
Malibu Boats and MasterCraft Boat Holdings declined 13.7 percent and 12.9 percent, respectively. Patrick Industries fell 17.7 percent and LCI declined 3.5 percent to finish out trading “strikingly lower,” Schultz said.
Analysts say the drops are due largely to concerns about discretionary spending and consumers pulling back on vacations plans, said Schultz.
The growing outbreak has wreaked havoc on the travel and tourism and manufacturing supply chains, according to the Washington Post.
“A global recession is more likely than not,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told the newspaper. “The line between an expanding economy and recession is crossed when investors, businesses and — most important — consumers lose faith. Faith that they will have a job, that they will receive a paycheck, and that their retirement nest egg is safe.”
Minutes into the opening of the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, stocks had fallen so much, so quickly that they tripped the so-called “circuit breaker.” That hasn’t happened since 1997, and it immediately forced a 15-minute break in trading on the hopes that investors would re-asses. When the timeout ended, stocks barely budged, staying at low levels all day.
Circuit breaker rules were put in place after 1987′s “Black Monday,” when a market drop wiped out $500 billion in a single day — then the biggest single-day drop in history — and the equivalent of about $1.1 trillion today.
On what the Post called “coronavirus Monday,” the Dow shed $528 billion of value, according to analyst Howard Silverblatt of S&P Dow Jones Indices.
