Dow plunges 266 pts as economic concerns grow

NEW YORK (AP) — The stock market fell sharply Tuesday because investors have grown increasingly worried about the economy. The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 265.87 at 11,866.62. The Dow has fallen eight straight days, also the longest streak since October 2008. It’s down 858 points, or 6.7 percent.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index lost 33 points, or 2.6 percent, and is now down 0.3 percent for the year. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 266 points, or 2.2 percent, and is now up just 2.5 percent for the year.

A series of weak economic reports and poor earnings reports from several big companies spurred the market decline.

The Commerce Department reported that consumers cut their spending in June for the first time in nearly two years. Analysts had predicted a slight increase. Incomes also rose by the smallest amount since September, reflecting a weak job market.

The news came one day after a weak manufacturing report. And last Friday, the government said that in the first half of the year, the economy grew at its slowest pace since the recession ended in June 2009.

“The market is starting to wonder where the growth is going to come from,” said Nick Kalivas, a vice president of financial research at MF Global. “It hasn’t hit the panic button yet, but that’s where we’re drifting.”

The S&P 500 closed down 32.89 points at 1,254.05. It has fallen seven straight days, losing 6.8 percent. That’s the S&P’s longest string of losses since the height of the financial crisis in October 2008.

The Nasdaq composite fell 75.37, or 2.7 percent, to 2,669.24. And the Russell 2000, an index of smaller companies that many investors look to as a sign of market optimism about growth, fell 3.3 percent. It is now down 2.1 percent for the year.

All 30 stocks in the Dow fell. General Electric Co., Pfizer Inc. and Home Depot Inc. led the index lower with losses of four percent or more. All but 13 of the 500 companies in the S&P index fell.

Archer Daniels Midland Co. dropped 6 percent after the agricultural conglomerate said it missed Wall Street’s profit forecasts. High-end retailer Coach Inc. lost nearly 7 percent after the company said margins declined, cutting into profits.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to a low for the year of 2.62 percent from 2.75 percent Monday. Investors bought Treasury securities, which are considered safe, because of the economic worries. That drove prices up and yields, which move the opposite way, down. Gold, another asset investors buy when they’re worried about the direction of the economy, gained 1.4 percent to $1,645 an ounce.

Even with the current streak of losses, the S&P and Dow are near where they were at the end of June. But some investors say that there’s a strong likelihood both indexes will decline further this year because the economy is not as strong as they thought it was in June.

Last year when the economy slowed sharply, the Federal Reserve began a bond-buying stimulus program, known as quantitative easing. That was credited with helping the U.S. economy avoid another recession.

Now, the Fed has indicated it does not have plans to implement another round of what is called monetary stimulus. And the new focus on deficit reduction in Washington makes it even less likely that Congress would approve what is called fiscal stimulus.

“With this debt debate going on, there is not an expectation for more fiscal or monetary stimulus and that’s a real concern,” said Jim Peters, the head of Tactical Allocation Group, a money manager in Michigan with $1.5 billion under management.

The S&P index fell through what’s referred to as its 200-day moving average, a measure that technical traders look at to determine whether the market is moving up or down longer term. Many investors use the average as a sign of when to sell.

“The market broke through some pretty critical support levels,” said Richard Ross, the global technical strategist at Auerbach Grayson, and dampened market optimism. He said that investors will wait for the market to settle before they buy again.

The S&P is now down 8 percent since reaching its high for the year of 1,363 on April 29. That puts it close to a 10 percent drop, which would signal a market correction. A drop of more than 20 percent would put an end to the bull market that started in March 2009.

In 2008, the S&P had a much steeper decline. Over eight straight days of declines that ended on Oct. 8, the index lost 22.9 percent. It fell even further over the next six months. Since March 2009, the S&P is up 85 percent, not including dividends.

The consumer spending pullback was the latest indication that the U.S. economy may be slowing. Many economists, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, have said the U.S. economy would gain momentum in the second half of the year as gas prices fall and Japan’s factories recover from the earthquake disaster in March. Slow U.S. manufacturing growth, a weak job market and concerns about spending cuts that are included in the debt deal have cast doubt on those predictions.

President Barack Obama signed a compromise bill Tuesday to raise the country’s borrowing limit, hours ahead of a midnight deadline after which the U.S. government wouldn’t have enough money to pay all its bills. The passage of the bill averted the possibility of a default on U.S. debt. The bill also requires more than $2 trillion in spending cuts to be made over the next decade.

Growth in China and India also has slowed recently after their central banks raised interest rates. American corporations have counted on increasing sales in Asia as a way to make up for slower revenue growth in the U.S. As a whole, companies in the S&P 500 index are expected to make nearly half their profits overseas in 2011.

Four stocks fell for every one that rose on the New York Stock Exchange. Volume was higher than average at 5.3 billion shares.