US stocks ended sharply lower today as market turmoil in China eclipsed Greece’s debt crisis, while the New York Stock Exchange suffered a major outage.
Fears that a rout in Chinese stocks could seriously harm the country’s economy and spread beyond its borders pushed the S&P 500 below its 200-day moving average for the first time since October and into negative territory for 2015.
The NYSE, a unit of Intercontinental Exchange Inc, resumed trade late in the session after a technical problem forced a suspension for more than three hours in the biggest outage to strike a US financial market in nearly two years.
Chinese shares have fallen more than 30 percent in the last three weeks, and some investors fear China’s turmoil is now a bigger risk than the crisis in Greece.
Wall Street maintained its losses after the release of minutes of a June Federal Reserve policy meeting in which officials said they needed to see more signs of a strengthening US economy before raising interest rates.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 261.49 points, or 1.47 percent, to end at 17,515.42. The S&P 500 lost 34.65 points, or 1.66 percent, to 2,046.69 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 87.70 points, or 1.75 percent, to 4,909.76.
All 10 major S&P 500 sectors were lower, with the materials index down 2.17 percent.
Source: Buenos Aires Herald