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Black Monday: JSE suffers one of its biggest crashes on record

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After a wild trading day, which at one stage saw the JSE's all share index lose more than 12% of its value, many of South Africa's biggest companies lost billions in value.

Old Mutual slumped 16% after announcing its results. Resource shares were among the biggest losers, with Implats and Northam down 19%.

FirstRand was down 10%. Other big losers included MTN (-12%) and Sasol (-12%)

Across the world, $20 trillion has now been wiped off global markets in the past month, Bloomberg reports.

The latest losses were triggered by the US central bank's emergency rate cut of a full one percentage point. This brought interest rates effectively to 0% in the US. The central bank also committed to pumping $700 billion into the markets through buying securities.

But the Fed's action spooked the market. Investors are worried that Fed took such drastic action because it has information about the coronavirus impact that the market may not yet reflect.

And secondly, the Fed has now used almost all its ammunition, especially when it comes to interest rates. It now can't go any lower than 0% to buffer the market against any further shocks.

After weakening to around R16.70/$, the rand was last trading at R16.53.

European markets hit their weakest levels since 2012, and the US market fell so far, so fast early on Monday that trading had to be halted for a short while.The JSE's all share index ended the day 8.3% lower (at 40 5000 points), which is the bourse's sixth-worst performance since 1978:

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Rand - Dollar
18.97
-0.1%
Rand - Pound
24.08
+0.1%
Rand - Euro
20.61
-0.1%
Rand - Aus dollar
12.37
+0.4%
Rand - Yen
0.13
+0.5%
Platinum
906.50
-1.8%
Palladium
1,010.52
+0.4%
Gold
2,157.07
-0.2%
Silver
24.99
-0.2%
Brent Crude
86.89
+1.8%
Top 40
66,032
-0.3%
All Share
72,214
-0.3%
Resource 10
53,305
-0.0%
Industrial 25
99,838
-0.6%
Financial 15
16,604
-0.1%
All JSE data delayed by at least 15 minutes Iress logo
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