How low can it go?

Uncertainty is gaining the upper hand on Wall Street again, with stocks opening sharply lower as coronavirus fears continue to inject unprecedented volatility into the market.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 1,000 points at the opening bell on Wall Street or 4 percent. The index continued to head downward to dip below 20,000.

The broader S&P 500 - a gauge for the health of US retirement and college savings accounts - dropped 3.66 percent at the open - well shy of the 7 percent level that trips circuit breakers that halt trading for 15 minutes.

The Nasdaq Composite Index opened more than 5.9 percent lower as well.

Investors are once again dumping stocks for the safety of United States government bonds, sending yields on US treasuries - which move in the opposite direction of price - down sharply.

  alJazeera

Great. So now your bonds are going toward worthless, too.

With coronavirus now being reported in all 50 US states, uncertainty over the extent of the economic damage the outbreak will leave in its wake has analysts and economists scrambling to reassess forecasts made less than a weak ago and injecting a healthy dose of hedging into predictions for how the second half of the year could shake out.

"The rapid escalation of measures to contain the coronavirus outbreak suggests that the economic damage will be even larger than we anticipated only a few days ago, and we are now pencilling in a 10% annualised decline in GDP in the second quarter." Andrew Hunter, senior US economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a note on Wednesday. "For now we expect activity to begin to rebound over the second half of the year, but that will depend on the virus being brought under control over the next few months and on Congress stepping up to the plate with a substantial fiscal response."

I regret to inform you the former is much more certain than the latter.