On Friday, stock markets across almost all European countries performed very poorly, primarily due to the dismal performance of the U.S. stock market. The Japanese stock market also fared terribly, experiencing the second-largest drop since the pandemic. Contributing factors include disappointing U.S. labor market data, which many have interpreted as the beginning of a slowdown in the U.S. economy, which had recently been performing exceptionally well and exceeding expectations.
However, the main reason for the downturn is the plummeting value of shares of the largest U.S. tech companies, which have been affected by a general atmosphere of skepticism regarding their profitability. Intel’s shares, which announced a 15 percent workforce reduction on Friday, dropped by 29.61 percent. Amazon’s stock price fell by 11.77 percent following the announcement of very disappointing financial results. Tesla and Nvidia shares lost over 7 percent. The losses of these major U.S. tech companies, among the most important in the world, also impacted European companies in the sector, contributing to widespread declines in stock markets around the globe.
As a result, all the major European indices closed the day down, as did those in the United States. Indices, which aggregate and summarize the performance of large companies’ shares, are heavily influenced by tech companies.
The FTSE Mib, the most representative index of the Italian stock market, was among the European indices with the most significant losses, falling by 2.58 percent. The FTSE 100, the London stock exchange index, closed with a loss of 1.42 percent. The Dax 40, Germany’s most important index, fell by 2.44 percent. France’s Cac 40 dropped by 1.44 percent. In the United States, the Nasdaq, which includes all the major tech stocks, lost 2.43 percent but approached a drop of nearly 6 percent during the day. The S&P 500 index, representing the performance of the 500 largest publicly traded companies in the U.S., fell by 1.84 percent. The Dow Jones, the most important and well-known U.S. stock index, lost 1.51 percent.
The Nikkei index, the most representative of Japanese financial markets, also closed with a loss, down 5.81 percent. However, Asian markets closed before the U.S. markets opened, so they were not directly influenced by the U.S. declines. In this case, the primary factor was the Bank of Japan’s decision on Wednesday to increase interest rates, which is driving up t
