Tech woes, tensions with China sink stocks

NEW YORK » Stocks tumbled Monday after China raised import duties on a number of U.S. exports, bringing the two economic giants closer to a full-on trade conflict. Big technology companies, long investor favorites, suffered heavy losses.

The deepening worries over newly protectionist U.S. trade policies combined with blowback toward technology companies, including Facebook’s ever-widening privacy scandal, have prompted investors to pull money out of the market. That has meant steep drops in former big winners including Netflix, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

Among other recent winners, Intel dove 6.1 percent following a report in Bloomberg News that Apple plans to start using its own chips in Mac computers, and Amazon sank following more broadsides from President Donald Trump on Twitter.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell as much as 758 points, although major indexes regained some of their losses later in the afternoon. The Dow lost 458.92 points, or 1.9 percent, to 23,644.19. The S&P 500 index gave up 58.99 points, or 2.2 percent, to 2,581.88.

The Nasdaq composite slumped 193.33 points, or 2.7 percent, to 6,870.12. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks fell 36.90 points, or 2.4 percent, to 1,492.53.

Kate Warne, an investment