By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. stock markets staged a modest bounce at the opening of trade on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump lashed out at mainstream media for “panicking markets” with reports about the coronavirus.
By 9:35 AM ET (1435 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average had risen 237 points or 0.9%, while the S&P 500 was up 1.0% and the Nasdaq Composite was up 1.3%.
They’ve still all lost between 7% and 8% over the last week, however, as fears of the Covid-19 hurting economies outside China and the Far East have grown. Anecdotal evidence continued to show a gradual recovery in Chinese economic activity and a further slowdown in the incidence of new cases in the country on Wednesday.
“The market was overbought and was riding for a bit of a fall,” Charles Dumas, chief economist at TS Lombard in London, said on a call with clients. “We don’t think the market is excessively overpriced at this point.
Earlier, President Trump had tweeted that network news channels were “doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets.”
His comments came less than a day after the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the country’s lead scientific agency for fighting epidemics, said that Americans should prepare for the outbreak to spread to U.S. communities.
Trump said he would hold a press briefing on the subject at 6 PM ET in Washington.
Among individual stocks, Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS) fell 1.1% after abruptly announcing on Tuesday evening that CEO Robert Iger will step down with immediate effect. His successor will be Bob Chapek, a long-serving company insider who currently runs the theme parks division.
Another decliner was Virgin Galactic, which fell 3.4% after reporting its net loss widened to $73 million in the fourth quarter from $46 million a year earlier.
Elsewhere, airline stocks stabilized at lower levels after sharp falls in the last couple of days. American Airlines (NASDAQ:AAL), Delta (NYSE:DAL) and United (NASDAQ:UAL) rose by between 1.2% and 2.1%.