Empty shelves as worried families stock up
PANICKED shoppers cleared supermarket shelves yesterday while stock markets plunged amid fears over the rise in coronavirus cases.
Stores in Milan saw bumper sales as worried families stocked up in case they are quarantined in their homes.
In Britain, the FTSE 100 share index plunged more than three per cent while Italy’s stock market sank 5 per cent. The biggest losers in the UK were easyJet, plunging 16 per cent, while Tui was down as was British Airways owner IAG which fell by 9 per cent.
In contrast, the price of gold soared to its highest level in seven years as investors sought a safe haven to put their money.
Shares of big tech stocks like Apple, whose supply chains have been hit by the virus, fell 4.7 per cent. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett warned the virus would hit a “very significant percentage of businesses”.
Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said shareholders may now be “reappraising the situation” after initially shrugging off the virus’s threat to corporate earnings.
THE FTSE 100 suffered its sharpest fall for more than four years yesterday as growing fears of a coronavirus pandemic sent stock markets into meltdown.
More than £60billion was wiped from Britain’s top companies as the blue chip index plunged 247 points to 7156. Its 3.3 per cent drop was the worst since January 2016.
Markets in Germany, France and Spain fell 4 per cent while in Italy, where authorities are trying to contain the biggest outbreak of coronavirus in Europe, leading shares crashed by more than 5 per cent. America’s Dow Jones was down nearly 1,000 points, or 3 per cent, by the UK close.
Worries over falling demand for crude sent oil prices sliding by 5 per cent, while the price of gold hit a seven-year high of about $1,674 an ounce.
Travel companies bore the brunt of the equities sell-off. easyJet lost 16 per cent of its value and British Airways owner IAG was down 9 per cent.
Richard Hunter, head of markets at interactive investor, said: “The disquieting developments of the impact of coronavirus have fired a warning shot to markets which had, to a large extent, previously been displaying some indifference to the outbreak.
“The realisation that cases outside of China could represent the early stages of a pandemic have not only ignited fears on the human level, but also that the economic impact could be more severe than initially envisaged.”
Guy Foster, head of research at wealth manager, Brewin Dolphin, said the sanguine attitude of markets towards the coronavirus had partly relied on the fact that the virus seemed to have been contained to a small area of China.
“That pillar of support wobbled a little with the news of more cases in Korea and Italy and investors reacted accordingly,” he added.