Wall Street close
A late PS: Wall Street has ended the day in the red.
After a session rattled by the soaring oil price, and the shock drop in US employment levels last month, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has closed down 445 points, or 0.93%, at 47,508 points.
The S&P 500 share index fell by 1.35%.
Oil has continued to surge through the day, with Brent crude now up over 8% at $92.33 a barrel, and US crude also over the $90 a barrel mark at $90.68, up almost 12% today.
Afternoon summary
The UK stock market has recorded its biggest weekly fall in eleven months, as the Middle East crisis has hit shares.
The FTSE 100 share index has closed 129 points lower today at 10,284, a drop of 1.24% during today’s session.
That means it has lost 5.75% of its value since the start of this week, its worst performance since the week to 4 April 2025, when Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs rocked markets.
The sell-off came as oil surged – Brent crude is trading around $90.87 a barrel now, having hit $91.89 a barrel earlier, its highest in almost two years.
Oil is up over 6% today by 25% this week!
Reports that Kuwait had begun cutting production of oil at some fields, after running out of space to store it, pushed up the oil price today, as did Qatar’s energy minister who predicted that if the war continued unabated, all Gulf energy exporters would shut down production within weeks and oil would rise to $150 a barrel.
Investors were also rattled by a bad US jobs report, showing that America’s economy lost 92,000 jobs in February.
Analysts at TS Lombard warned that the green shoots in the US labor market have “turned brown”.
They predict an improvement will come, as a “positive fiscal impulse” will provide fresh demand to get the jobs market out the doldrums.
However, they add, this is “subject to energy effects and demand destruction from the Iran war”.
In other news:
Updated
