Stock markets in New York fell further on Thursday. Concerns that central banks will cause a recession in their fight against high inflation have gripped Wall Street. To curb inflation, many central banks, including the Federal Reserve, have raised interest rates.
Due to the higher borrowing costs, less money flows into the economy and that could cause an economic contraction.
Shortly after opening, the Dow-Jones index was down 1.6 percent at 30,546 points and the broad S&P 500 also lost 1.6 percent, to 3757 points. Both indicators are heading for the largest quarterly loss since the outbreak of the corona pandemic in 2020. The S&P 500 has had its worst first half since 1970. Tech indicator Nasdaq dropped 2 percent to 10,952 points and is heading for the worst quarter since 2008.
Streaming service Netflix, which has already lost about 70 percent of its market value this year, fell more than 3 percent. Facebook parent company Meta, which has halved in market value since the start of the year, fell more than 1 percent.
Attention also continued to be focused on crypto companies. Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency in the world, briefly dropped below $ 19,000 and has already fallen almost 60 percent in value this year. Crypto exchange Coinbase and software company Microstrategy, which owns a lot of bitcoin, fell around 8 percent.
Walgreens Boots Alliance also came up with numbers. The owner of retail chains Walgreens and Boots posted more revenue and profit than expected last quarter. The stock nevertheless fell 5 percent.
Spirit Airlines rose just about 5 percent. The budget airline has postponed the vote of shareholders on the planned merger with Frontier Group (minus 0.7 percent) until July 8. The postponement follows competitor JetBlue’s attempts to prevent the merger by acquiring Spirit itself. JetBlue (minus 5.3 percent) has already increased its bid for Spirit several times.