Snowballing sell-off drives Dow down 679 points

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Thursday's anniversary of the stock market peak turned into one of the worst days in Wall Street history, with the Dow Jones industrials loosing a breathtaking 679 points.

U.S. stocks lost more than 7 percent, $872 billion of investments evaporated, and the Dow fell to 8,579. When the average crashed through the 9,000 level for the first time in five years in the final hour of trading, sellers had only begun to hit the gas pedal.

As bad as the day was, even worse was the cumulative effect of a historic run of declines: The Dow suffered a triple-digit loss for the sixth day in a row, a first, and the average dropped for the seventh day in a row, a losing streak not seen since 2002.

"Right now the market is just panicked," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York. "Nobody wants to take on any risk. Everybody just wants to get their money and put it under the mattress."

The panic quickly spread overseas, where Asian stock markets plummeted Friday.

Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 index shed more than 10 percent, Hong Kong's Hang Seng index lost more than 8 percent, South Korea's Kospi fell 7.4 percent, Shanghai's benchmark gave up 4.1 percent, and Singapore's Straits Times index was down 7.0 percent. In Syndey, Australia's S&P/ASX200 was down 6.8 percent.

Thursday's sell-off on Wall Street took place one year to the day after the Dow closed at its record high of 14,164. Since that day, frozen credit, record foreclosures, cascading job losses and outright fear have seized the market and sapped 39 percent of its value.

Paper losses for the year add up to an staggering $8.3 trillion, according to preliminary figures measured by the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Composite Index, which tracks 5,000 U.S.-based companies representing almost all stocks traded in America.

It was the second straight day that Wall Street was rocked by a final-hour sell-off, but this one was particularly shocking.

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