NEW YORK — Fears that Greece’s troubles could spread through the global financial system shook markets on Monday, driving U.S. stocks to their worst day of the year.
Investors fled from stocks in Europe and the U.S. and retreated to the safety of government bonds. Measures of volatility spiked. In many ways, it looked similar to previous episodes in Europe’s long-running debt crisis, except that this time, investors said, they weren’t quite as worried.
Events over the weekend left Greece perilously close to defaulting on its debts. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said his government would hold a referendum Sunday on budget proposals made by the country’s lenders.
European officials refused to extend the country’s bailout program, which expires Tuesday, the same day it’s supposed to make a debt payment to the International Monetary Fund.
Jeff Carbone, a senior partner at Cornerstone Financial Partners, said the real worry isn’t so much Greece, a country with an economy roughly the size of Missouri’s.
“It’s the contagion risk,” he said. “If Greece goes, who’s next?”
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index dropped 43.85 points, or 2.1 percent, to 2,057.64. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 350.33 points, or 2 percent, to 17,596.35, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 122.04 points, or 2.4 percent, to 4,958.47.
The losses wiped out all the gains for the Dow and S&P 500 indexes this year.
Investors bought German and British government bonds, which are seen as safe havens, and sold bonds issued by Greece.
“We are really looking at a situation where the market doesn’t know what the fallout is going to be,” said David Lafferty, chief market strategist at Natixis Global Asset Management. “But the U.S. market feels that it is relatively contained at this point.”
The rating agency Standard & Poor’s said it now sees a 50 percent chance of Greece dropping out of the eurozone. If Greece defaults and switches to a new currency, it’s sure to shake global financial markets. But the world is unlikely to see anything like the full-blown crisis of 2008. A few years ago, banks across Europe were loaded down with loans to the Greek government, corporations and banks.
“Today, the European banks have shed much of their Greek debt and they have significantly increased their capital,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “A Greek default and exit from the eurozone would be devastating to Greece’s economy, but no one else’s.”
