US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has promised that Washington will do "everything to keep markets open" following turmoil on the country's stock markets.
The statement comes after US stock markets took another nosedive on Thursday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average index (DJIA) falling by more than 2,300 points, hours after President Donald Trump announced that Washington would be suspending travel from certain European countries for a 30-day period as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Dow marked its worst drop since the 1987 Black Monday market crash which saw stocks plummet by more than 22%.
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) closed the day with the DJIA index 2,352.60 points in the red, and the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite saw 260.74 and 750.25 point losses, respectively.
Despite the plunging figures, US President Donald Trump suggested on Thursday that “the markets are going to be just fine” in the immediate future.
On 9 March, stock markets around the world tumbled amid fears over the coronavirus disease, officially named COVID-19, and a fall in global oil prices after the OPEC+ deal collapsed.
According to the Johns Hopkins University Centre for Systems Science and Engineering, more than 120,000 COVID-19 cases have been confirmed globally, with more than 4,700 documented deaths.
