A disappointing jobs report issued on Friday sent the Nasdaq composite falling to its lowest level in over 15 months. This signified the end of the short winning streak experienced by Wall Street last week.
Standard & Poor's number fell down 35.40 points, or 1.9 percent, to 1880.5, while the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 211.61 points, or 1.3 percent, to 16,204.07 even after posting gains for two straight days. It even went down over 535 points at one point.
Nasdaq was the one that suffered the real carnage. It slid down 146.1 points, or 3.3 percent, to 4,363.14. That is the lowest it closed since Oct. 20, 2014.
With those figures, the Nasdaq suffered a total of 5 percent loss last week. It is now 16.4 percent below the record close it experienced in 2015. The index is slowly nearing 20 percent, the point where it could be considered a bear market.
From the moment the bell was rung, stocks started sliding as their reaction to the weak January jobs report. This report is the key information that indicated a possible downhill trend in the world's largest economy.
Considering that the world market is currently unstable, this situation also further incites uncertainty over the interest rate policy of the US Federal Reserve.
The US government announced that it was able to create 151,000 new jobs last month, but it was below the 190,000 fresh jobs the economists previously projected. This figure meant that unemployment rate went down 4.9 percent, an eight-year low and also below December's figure of 5 percent.
The job projections in November were adjusted upward by 28,000 to 280,000, but the big number of jobs in December was downgraded by 30,000 to 262,000. And then the 0.5 percent rise in the average hourly wages also figured in the stock market's guarded reaction.
