In the final hour Thursday the Dow tumbled down over 675 points. It is now in the lowest level in five years after a major credit ratings agency said it was thinking about cutting its rating on General Motors Corp.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index also slide down more than 7 percent.
Just a year ago the Dow closed at a record high. It is now 39 percent down, that's a total of 5,585 points down.
Today's sloop was due to Standard & Poor's Ratings Services putting GM and its finance affiliate GMAC LLC under review. The rating of GM may be cut because of weak United States car sales.
Yahoo reports:
"The story is getting to be like that movie Groundhog Day," said Arthur Hogan, chief market analyst at Jefferies & Co. He pointed to the still-frozen credit markets, and Libor, the bank-to-bank lending rate that remains stubbornly high despite the Fed's recent rate cut.
"Until that starts coming down, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone getting excited about stocks," Hogan said. "Everything we're seeing his historic. The problem is historic, the solutions are historic, and unfortunately, the sell-off is historic. It's not the kind of history you want to be making."
Tumble,Tumble, Tumble Down Goes The Dow
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