The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1,175 points on Monday, its largest one-day point drop in history, to close at 24,345, a decline of 4.6 percent.
At one point the Dow was down more than 1,500 points before slightly rebounding at the closing bell.
The previous record decline for the Dow came on Sept. 29, 2008, when it fell 778 points. The Dow is still up 21 percent compared to a year ago.
Health care, energy and financial stocks posted the largest declines. All 11 sectors of the S&P 500 were down.
The S&P 500 slumped 4.1 percent to 2,648. The Nasdaq dropped 3.78 percent to 6,967.
Randy Frederick, vice president of trading and derivatives for Charles Schwab, said the fall had been expected after markets hit record highs.
Frederick said the market has “been going almost straight up since the start of the year,” adding that the pullback was “expected and healthy.”
“It doesn’t mean the bull market is over; it simply takes away some of the froth and irrational exuberance from stocks and puts us back on a more sustainable trendline,” Frederick said.
The Dow plummeted as President Donald Trump was speaking to workers at the Sheffer Corporation in Cincinnati, touting the recently-passed tax overhaul law.
“America is once again open for business,” Trump said in his speech.
The White House downplayed the stock market drop as a part of a normal seesaw of the market but maintained that the overall direction of the economy under President Donald Trump is strong.
“Look, markets do fluctuate in the short term. We all know that. And they do that for number of reasons,” Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said today aboard Air Force One. “But the fundamentals of this economy are very strong and they’re headed in the right direction — for the middle class, in particular.”
Shah specifically pointed to wage growth and low unemployment levels as indicators of the economy’s strength.
The political challenge for the White House is trying to distance the president from a bad day on the stock market. Trump, of course, has been quick to take credit for the stock market on its good days.
The market meltdown came just hours after Jerome Powell was officially sworn in as the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, replacing Janet Yellen, who had served as Fed chair since 2014.
