A day of bad economic news dragged the stock market to its worst performance of the year, completely erasing all the gains it had made in all of 2012.
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With less than an hour left to go in the trading day, the Dow Jones average is down almost 280 points on the day, nearly every stock on the S&P 500 is in the red, and the NASDAQ is slumped as well. Oh, and interest rates on treasury bonds are in the tank, a sign that, as Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal explains, investors don't want their money anywhere near the stock market. The Dow Jones which had rallied well back in February and March and hit a four-year high in April, is now below where it started at beginning of January.
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The next few weeks aren't going to be any better either. June is traditionally a terrible month for the markets, economic signs all around the globe are trending down, there's another Greek election on June 17 that could be the first step toward its exit from the eurozone. Oh, and that's just a couple of days before the Federal Reserve board meets to possibly discuss a third round of quantitative easing. Did we mention that the Supreme Court will release its Obamacare ruling any time now? So basically the entire financial world will be walking on eggshells for the rest of the month.
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It seems that now would be an excellent time to revive this blog, but the person who really had the worst day of all is President Obama, who took a beating from Mitt Romney and everyone else after that dismal jobs report. (The Dow actually went down 30 points while he was delivering a televised speech earlier today.) It's obviously a long way to November, but he desperately needs a win on the economic front and instead got a blowout loss.
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Update (4:00 p.m.): The Dow officially closed down 277 points (going negative for the year), and the NASDAQ and S&P 500 both closed in "correction territory," which means they are down more than 10 percent from their 2012 high. Also: The 10-year treasury yield dropped below 1.5 percent for the first time ever and the price of crude oil is at an eight-month low. Rough day.