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Obama win didn't cure jitters

NEW YORK - A case of postelection nerves sent Wall Street plunging yesterday as investors, looking past Barack Obama's presidential victory, returned to their fears of a deep and protracted recession. Volatility swept over the market again, with the Dow Jones industrials falling nearly 500 points and all the major indexes tumbling more than 5 percent.

NEW YORK - A case of postelection nerves sent Wall Street plunging yesterday as investors, looking past Barack Obama's presidential victory, returned to their fears of a deep and protracted recession. Volatility swept over the market again, with the Dow Jones industrials falling nearly 500 points and all the major indexes tumbling more than 5 percent.

The market was widely expected to give back some gains after a runup that lifted the Standard & Poor's 500 index more than 18 percent and that gave the Dow its best weekly advance in 34 years; moreover, many analysts had warned that Wall Street faced more turbulence after two months of devastating losses.

But investors lost their recent confidence about the economy and began dumping stocks again.

"The market has really gotten ahead of itself, and falsely priced in that this recession wasn't going to be as prolonged as thought," said Ryan Larson, head of equity trading at Voyageur Asset Management, a subsidiary of RBC Dain Rauscher. "Regardless of who won the White House, these problems are not going away."

"We're in a really bad recession, period," he said. "People are locking in profits and realizing we're not out of the woods." *

-Associated Press