London’s FTSE 100 plunged over 1.5% on Monday to hit their lowest in over three months, as recession fears in the United States triggered a global sell-off.
By 0722 GMT, the blue-chip FTSE 100 index fell 1.9% to its lowest since April and on track for its worst day since March 2023.
Meanwhile, the mid-cap FTSE 250 index was off 3%, after clocking its worst day since September 2022 in the previous session.
Friday’s data showed a sharp slowdown in U.S. job growth, heightening fears of a deterioration in the American labour market and a potential recession, pushing investors to raise bets on a half-point cut in September by the Federal Reserve to rescue the economy.
“A lot of it comes from faith that the Federal Reserve has gone a little bit too far with its monetary policy in terms of keeping rates restrictive for too long. That negative sentiment has spilled over into other markets,” said Daniela Hathorn, senior market analyst at Capital.com.
FTSE 100 falls over 1pc amid global stock slump
In London, most sub-sectoral indexes trended lower. Automobile and parts were the worst hit with a 3.9% decline, while precious metal miners trended 3.2% lower despite a firming in gold prices.
Financial stocks like banks and life insurers declined 3.1% and 3.7% respectively.
“If we do see a recession, banks get hit quite hard because people start to take out less loans,” Hathorn added.
Energy shares also fell 2.7% , as recession fears in the U.S. pushed oil prices lower.
On the data front, domestic manufacturing activity numbers are due later in the day, in an otherwise data-light week.
John Wood Group fell over 37% to the bottom of the FTSE 250 after Dubai’s Sidara said it was walking away from its plan to buy the British oilfield services and engineering firm.
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