NEW YORK: Wall Street stocks fell sharply in early trading Wednesday on weak jobs data and a pessimistic warning from President Donald Trump about the rising US death toll from the coronavirus.
About 20 minutes into trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen 3.0 percent losing around 660 points 21,259.74.
The broad-based S&P 500 dropped 3.2 percent to 2,501.05, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index tumbled 2.9 percent to 7,476.84.
US private hiring plummeted in March by 27,000 the biggest -- and only -- drop since September 2017, according to the monthly report from payrolls firm ADP, but company said the statistics underestimate the losses.
Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics called the figures useless in reflecting only a small portion of the job loss in recent weeks.
"The labor market was in good shape before the virus, but we knew that anyway, and it's irrelevant in the face of the impending discontinuity in the data," he said in an analysis of the data which were compiled before the worst of the COVID-19 lockdowns were imposed.
Markets also are girding for another huge jump in first-time unemployment claims on Thursday. But analysts warn that the official government jobs report on Friday, like the ADP data, will not fully capture the coronavirus hit.
Analysts said the pullback in stocks also reflected unease at Trump's pronouncements about the virus Tuesday night after health officials said there could be 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the United States, even with the current efforts at mitigation.
"This is going to be a very painful, a very, very painful two weeks," Trump said at the daily White House press conference.