NEW YORK — U.S. stocks plunged Friday, diving toward declines for both the week and the month of February after massive losses by American International Group Inc. shook Wall Street and poor results from Dell Inc. rocked the tech sector.
“We had a trainload of bad news; they couldn’t keep the bad news coming fast enough, yet we’re going to end the week pretty much where we started,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Jefferies & Co.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 315.79 points to 12,266.39, positioning the blue chips for a weekly loss of roughly 115 points, or 0.9 percent. The Dow fell 3 percent in February and is down 7.5 percent for the year.
All of the Dow’s 30 components spent the final day of the week in the red. The blue-chip bleeding was led by American International Group, off more than 7 percent in the aftermath of the insurance giant’s reporting of its largest loss in its almost 90 years in business.
Other financial stocks were hit as well, with shares of Ambac Inc. down on reports that hopes for new capital have hit a snag.
Outside the Dow industrials, Dell Inc. fell 4.5 percent after the PC maker reported fourth-quarter profits fell 6 percent from a year ago.
The S&P 500 dropped 37.05 points to 1,330.63, down 1.7 percent for the week, 3.5 percent for the month and 9.4 percent year-to-date.
The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite declined 60.09 points to 2,271.48, a drop of 1.4 percent on the week, a 5 percent decline for February and 14.4 percent so far this year.
Volume on the New York Stock Exchange topped 1.3 billion shares, with six stocks posting losses for each share on the rise. On the Nasdaq, 977 million shares traded hands, with decliners topping advancers by more than 4-to-1.
The tech sector was among those retreating, with declines coming from bellwethers including Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp.
Retail stocks also slipped amid gloomy news on consumer spending, with the S&P Retail Index off about 1 percent.
Gold futures finished with gains, having hit a record high of $978.50 an ounce overnight, as the metal continues to draw support from weakness in the U.S. dollar and rising investment flows into commodities. Gold for April delivery ended up $7.50 at $975 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Gold posted a weekly gain of $27.20 from last Friday’s closing level of $947.80.
Elsewhere on the Nymex, crude-oil futures hit a record high of $103.05 overnight before trimming gains to end at $101.84 a barrel.
The dollar pared its losses after dropping to three-year lows against the yen, with the greenback buying 103.95 yen after an earlier fall as low as 103.81 yen.
The stock indexes steepened their losses on a decline in consumer sentiment in February, with more households reporting financial distress than any time since the worst of the 1991 recession.
