Wall Street staggers into 2019 with modest gains, on the final day of its worst month in a decade
- The broad-based S&P 500 climbed 0.9 per cent on Monday, while the Dow was up 1.2 per cent
- But the gains did little to mask what has been a brutal end to the year on US markets
The US stock market concluded its worst year since the global financial crisis on Monday following a late-season collapse that also raised doubts about the prospects for 2019.
Major indices notched modest gains in the year’s final session, but it barely made a dent compared with the rest of December, the market’s worst month in nearly a decade.
Ending in the red for 2018 did not appear in the cards in the first weeks of the year, when Wall Street repeatedly shot to new records on the heels of a sweeping tax cut signed into law in December 2017 by US President Donald Trump.
But it did not take long for a host of worries to shake that confidence, from unease over an unpredictable series of trade wars launched by Trump, to angst over rising interest rates, to nervousness over economists’ warnings of slowing growth, or worse, a possible recession.
Wall Street blues: goodbye cheap money, hello volatility
And the declines rapidly accelerated in the final weeks of 2018, erasing all the gains since January.