U.S. stock markets fell Friday more than 1 percent after similar declines in markets around the world as the coronavirus pandemic continued to take a toll on the global economy.
At the close of Friday’s Wall Street trading, the benchmark Dow Jones industrial average fell 1.7 percent, the broad-based S&P 500 lost 1.5 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.5 percent.
In Europe, major indexes also fell in Friday’s trading, including in London (down 1.2 percent), Frankfurt (fell 0.5 percent) and Paris (1.6 percent lower), as global coronavirus cases exceeded 1 million.
Most Asian markets closed slightly down on Friday’s trading session, while the Nikkei 225 in Japan closed just 0.01 percent in the green.
Oil prices recorded their biggest weekly gain in five weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday that there could be a deal between Saudi Arabia and Russia over oil output.
A price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, coupled with less demand for oil because of coronavirus travel restrictions, pushed down the price of oil to about $20 a barrel.
U.S. payrolls lost more than 700,000 jobs in March, the biggest drop in payrolls since March 2009 during the recession that followed the housing crisis.
The head of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, said Friday that the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus would be “way worse” than the global financial crisis of 2008-09.
