S&P 500 posts biggest decline since March 2020

The S&P 500 just recorded its biggest loss since March 2020, having fallen 5.8 percent for the week.

Though the index actually saw a "small gain" of 0.2 percent on Friday, it nonetheless finished the week in the negative, writes The New York Times. It was S&P's 10th decline in the past 11 weeks. The Nasdaq Composite, meanwhile, rose 1.4 percent on Friday, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.1; they too finished at a loss.

Cryptocurrencies also had a tough go of it this week, with one of the largest lending platforms — Celsius Network — pausing all withdrawals and exchange platform Coinbase announcing layoffs. Meanwhile, "prices for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies tumbled," reports The Wall Street Journal.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Analysts don't expect the craziness to end until investors believe inflation has started to peak, or until the Federal Reserve relaxes its inflation-fighting crusade, the Times notes. Earlier this week, the central bank raised interest rates three-quarters of a percentage point, the largest hike since 1994.

"It's clear that there's still some volatility and that's a situation that's going be with us for a while given the rising uncertainty," John Canavan, lead analyst at Oxford Economics, told CNBC. "I do think that after the extreme moves that we've seen over the past week, it's sort of an exhausted market looking to a three-day weekend and just trying to find a place to settle in."