NEW YORK (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 02nd May, 2020) Wall Street's main stock indexes ended the first trading day of May down as much as 3 percent after being spooked by US threats to slap China with tariffs over the effects of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
US equity markets also fell after a slump in the shares of technology giants Amazon and Apple.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the broadest equities gauge on the New York Stock Exchange, closed down 2.6 percent at 23,723. The S&P 500, barometer for the top 500 US stocks, fell 2.8 percent to settle at 2,832. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite finished down 3.2 percent at 8,605.
On Thursday, US president Donald Trump blamed China for the United States' woes with the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump also threatened new tariffs, saying the US trade deal with China signed only in January, was of secondary importance to the pandemic.
"The 'Sell in May and Go Away' adage sounds about right," OANDA senior market analyst Edward Moya said. "Investors are using Trump's threat that some tariffs could be levied on China as an excuse to lock in profits. There's also profit-taking in big cap stocks Amazon and Apple."
Amazon's share price fell nearly 8 percent after lawmakers on the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee called on the e-commerce behemoth's founder Jeff Bezos to address potentially "misleading, and possibly criminally false or perjurious" statements made in an earlier testimony about the company's competitive practices.
Apple's stock fell almost 2 percent after the iconic iphone maker did not issue a profit guidance for the quarter ending in June, as it usually did. The company said it withdrew the guidance due to the difficulty of predicting business in its main market, China, after the COVID-19 outbreak there.
May's bumpy start in US stocks came after Wall Street finished April with double-digit gains, despite the economy shrinking by nearly 5 percent in the first quarter and some 30 million Americans losing their jobs due to lockdowns imposed over the COVID-19.
Wall Street began 2020 on a high, extending a multi-year rally, before the pandemic forced its three main indexes to lose as much as 35 percent at one point in March.
