Wall Street Slides on Assassination, Weak Data

Wall Street skidded today after the assassination of a Pakistani opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, and after the Commerce Department's durable goods orders exacerbated concerns about the American economy. The major indexes lost well over 1% and the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 190 points.

Bhutto's assassination raised the possibility of increasing political unrest abroad, always an unsettling prospect for investors who have already been contending with domestic economic concerns for months. Oil prices rose following the news, and that unwelcome inflationary trend only added to Wall Street's uneasiness.

Meanwhile, the government said orders for durable goods — big-ticket items from commercial jetliners to home appliances — rose by just 0.1% last month. Economists had been looking for a rise of 2.2%. Still, November saw the first rise in durable goods orders in the last four months.

The Labor Department said the number of workers seeking unemployment benefits showed a surprise increase last week. Applications filed for unemployment insurance rose by a seasonally adjusted 1,000 to 349,000. Economists had expecting the figure would fall to around 340,000 for last week.

In a bright spot, the Conference Board said its Consumer Confidence Index advanced to 88.6 in December from a revised 87.8 in November. It was the first increase since July and Wall Street had expected a slight drop.

Investors track the employment and consumer confidence figures because consumer spending represents about two-thirds of economic activity in America.

"The data came in a bit softer than people were anticipating and then you throw in the situation in Pakistan and that's led people to rush back into Treasurys," a chief economist at Payden & Rygel Investment Management in Los Angeles, Tom Higgins, said.

Today's drop was perhaps exaggerated by the fact that many traders were on vacation, making volume light and price swings more severe. Still, given the political uncertainty overseas, many investors were likely selling because they were uneasy about holding long positions going into a holiday weekend.

According to preliminary calculations, the Dow fell 192.08, or 1.42%, to 13,359.61.

Broader stock indicators also fell. The Standard & Poor's 500 index declined 21.34, or 1.42%, to 1,476.32, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 47.62, or 1.75%, to 2,676.79.