Stocks, Stock Market Plunge | featured news

The sell-off comes in reaction to the downgrade on U.S. debt by Standard & Poor's. Accelerating fears of a new global recession sent the Dow Jones industrial average plunging more than 600 points as Washington policymakers scrambled to contain the damage fueled by reaction to the U.S. credit rating downgrade.

The price of gold streaked past $1,700 an ounce for the first time Monday. Investors, beset by worries about the U.S. debt downgrade, Europe's financial crisis and slowing global growth, sought safety in the metal as stocks tumbled around the world.

A trading firm's use of a computer sell order triggered the May 6 market plunge, which sent the Dow Jones industrial average plunging nearly 1,000 points in less than a half-hour, federal regulators said Friday.

U.S. stock exchanges and regulators will likely propose market-wide safeguards to be launched in a six-month pilot program, starting June 14.

Futures trades by Waddell & Reed, a mutual fund based in Kansas, have been linked to the May 6 “flash crash” of the Dow.

The top securities regulator said no single event had been found to explain Thursday's mysterious market plunge, but the shocking drop was unacceptable and additional safeguards were coming.

The SEC and the major trading exchanges agreed that a market-wide "circuit-breaker" system should be established to handle the type of market volatility demonstrated in Thursday's unsettling market plunge.

As regulators sought to make sense of what was behind Thursday's wild gyrations in the stock market, some experts warned that Wall Street's effort to undo tainted trades could encourage the very behavior that led to the market plunge.

President Barack Obama said Friday that regulatory authorities were probing one of the wildest trading days in Wall Street history that left investors, government officials and traders scratching around for a cause.