NEW YORK — Investors plowed into safe-haven assets, led by the U.S. dollar and Treasurys, on Friday on an escalation of Europe’s debt crisis and geopolitical tensions in Korea.
Stocks and other riskier assets fell broadly as concerns grew that the sovereign-debt crisis in Ireland would spread to Portugal and Spain.
“Europe is falling apart. We are back to flight to quality trade,” said Thomas Roth, executive director in the U.S. government bond trading group at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities in New York.
The worries over the euro zone’s sovereign debt weighed on U.S. stocks, which fell despite positive signs on Black Friday sales. The Dow Jones industrial average tumbled 95.28 to 11,092 in Friday’s trading.
In a shortened trading session, the yield on the 10-year Treasury slipped to 2.87 percent, down from a 2.92 percent yield late Wednesday.
As concerns about the state of some highly indebted European nations have intensified in recent weeks, global investors have increasingly favored dollar-denominated Treasurys as a perceived safer refuge.
“The fear is that the contagion not just spreads to Portugal but also to Spain, which could have a combination of banking and sovereign issues,” said John Briggs, U.S. interest rate strategist at RBS Securities in Stamford, Conn.
As euro-zone worries boosted the dollar, gold and crude-oil futures fell.
