U.S. stock markets take a two-day winter break
NEW YORK — U.S. stock markets closed Monday as Hurricane Sandy made landfall, and they will remain closed today.
Much of New York’s financial center was at a standstill as the storm approached. Sections of the city’s Financial District were inside a mandatory evacuation zone.
The New York Stock Exchange has not been closed for two consecutive days because of weather since 1888, when a blizzard left snowdrifts as high as 40 feet. Hurricane Gloria in 1985 was the last storm to shut down the stock exchange.
“It’s a monumental event, and we take it very seriously,” said Larry Liebowitz, chief operating officer of NYSE Euronext, the company that operates the New York Stock Exchange. “It’s not a hyped-up drama.”
Spokesmen for the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq said they intend to reopen Wednesday morning and would keep investors updated.
Bond trading will also be closed today. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association closed bond trading at noon Monday. The yield on the benchmark 10year Treasury note was 1.72 percent, compared with 1.75 percent late Friday.
The storm’s landfall came at the start of a busy business news week. Some public companies have postponed quarterly earnings reports scheduled for release early this week and Sandy might force the Labor Department to delay the release of its October jobs report.
The hurricane has shuttered government offices and closed public transportation in and around Washington, D.C., and that might lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the data and statistics division of the Labor Department, to delay the release of the report. It’s the last jobs report before Tuesday’s presidential election.
“We will assess the situation when the weather emergency is over and notify the press and public of any changes at that time,” a spokesman, Gary Steinberg, wrote Monday in an e-mail.
Another Labor Department spokesman, Carl Fillichio, said employees are “working hard to ensure the timely release of employment data” at the end of the week. “It is our intention that Friday will be business as usual regarding the October Employment Situation Report.”
Predictions of an 11-foot storm surge prompted Goldman Sachs to stack sandbags around its West Street office in Lower Manhattan, home to some of the world’s largest financial firms.
Partial shutdowns included offices of the nation’s three biggest banks, JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc.
Employees at Citigroup weren’t allowed to enter their Lower Manhattan offices on Greenwich Street and Wall Street, according to a memo sent to workers and confirmed by a spokesman.
More than 20,000 Morgan Stanley employees are affected by the storm, with at least 15,000 of them able to work remotely, said Jim Rosenthal, the company’s chief operating officer. The New York City headquarters near Times Square was open, as was an office in Westchester County north of the city, and the firm provided hotel rooms nearby for employees who need them, Rosenthal said. He said many employees live near the office and are able to walk to work.
“We are open for business on both the retail and institutional side,” Rosenthal said. The company hasn’t had to transfer any trading to London, although it is prepared to do so if necessary, he said.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest U.S. bank, closed all buildings and branches in New York’s mandatory evacuation area, the four main heads of retail and mortgage operations said in a message to the bank’s retail employees. Office buildings outside the evacuation area in the city as well as New Jersey and Delaware were open Monday, though staff won’t be expected to commute today if they have safety, transit or child-care issues, they said.
Bank of America said it closed its offices at Two and Four World Financial Center on Monday as well as all of its New York City branches and Merrill Lynch wealthmanagement offices in New York and the mid-Atlantic markets. The company’s New York City headquarters at One Bryant Park and other office buildings in the city remained open.
European stock markets fell Monday. France’s CAC40 fell 0.8 percent, Britain’s FTSE fell 0.2 percent and Germany’s DAX lost 0.4 percent. Insurers such as Munich Re, Aviva PLC and Zurich Insurance fared worse than other stocks as investors worried about the potential cost of the storm’s damage.
“The economic impact cannot be underestimated,” said Elsa Lignos, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.