Why the stock market is freaking out again
CNN
Fear has set in on Wall Street, and stocks are having another miserable day.
Fear has set in on Wall Street, and stocks are having another miserable day. The Dow tumbled more than 1,000 points at the open, and the broader market plunged 3% Monday. The Nasdaq, full of risky tech stocks, dropped 3.7%. All of that comes amid a global market selloff. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index nosedived 12% — its worst rout in history. All major Asian and European markets fell substantially Monday. Three fears are emerging all at the same time to send markets into a tailspin Monday: Growing worries about a recession, concern that the Federal Reserve has failed to act promptly enough and a belief that big bets on AI may not pay off. The most prominent is fear that the US economy is in much worse shape than previously believed — evidenced by Friday’s unexpected jump in the unemployment rate. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the US economy added just 114,000 jobs in July — far fewer than expected — and the unemployment rate jumped to 4.3%. Although that’s not in and of itself an unhealthy unemployment rate, its sudden march higher is alarming: Last year, the unemployment rate was at its lowest level since the moon landing.
The DeepSeek drama may have been briefly eclipsed by, you know, everything in Washington (which, if you can believe it, got even crazier Wednesday). But rest assured that over in Silicon Valley, there has been nonstop, Olympic-level pearl-clutching over this Chinese upstart that managed to singlehandedly wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap in just a few hours and put America’s mighty tech titans on their heels.
At her first White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made an unusual claim about inflation that has stung American shoppers for years: Leavitt said egg prices have continued to surge because “the Biden administration and the department of agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage.”