AlQa'dah 10, 1436, August 25, 2015, SPA -- Global share prices posted some of their biggest falls Monday since the global financial crisis in 2008, amid growing fears about the economic outlook for China, according to dpa. On Wall Street, huge morning losses were pared by a midday rally. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 3.58 per cent, half of the blue-chip index's losses in the opening minutes of trading. The broader Standard & Poor's 500 Index dropped 3.9 per cent. Bloomberg News described the see-sawing session as one of the most volatile in Wall Street history. Europe's benchmark Euro Stoxx 50 of leading stocks closed down 5.61 per cent at 2,928.15 points, reflecting similar declines across the region's major bourses. Earlier, the Stoxx 50 index opened down 3.4 per cent at after a crash on the Shanghai bourse sparked a mass sell off by investors around the world. The share sell-off on Wall Street and in Europe followed a dramatic 8.5-per-cent drop in the Shanghai Composite Index, sparking big falls across Asia. While stocks in Tokyo ended the day down 4.6 per cent, the market in Hong Kong closed 5.3 per cent down. The shakeout in stocks around the world came in the wake of growing concerns among investors about the threat to global growth from the economic slowdown in China - the world's second-largest economy. With a steady flow of grim economic news out of the Asian powerhouse, the Chinese economy is likely to be on the agenda at next month's meeting in Istanbul of finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 major industrial and emerging economies. Deutsche Post DHL Group chief Frank Appel called the global equities rout an "overreaction." "That's purely psychological," he told dpa in Johannesburg. "It has nothing to do with economic fundamentals." China "can't grow 10 per cent a year forever," and the observed slowdown is only natural in a maturing economy, Appel said. Compounding the worries about China has been uncertainty among investors about the US Federal Reserve's plans for a possible hike in its benchmark interest rate, as the central bank begins an expected slow normalization of monetary police. The euro soared on hopes that the big selloff on Wall Street would prompt the Fed to postpone plans for a rate hike as early as next month. Europe's common currency at one point climbed 2.5 per cent to 1.1662 dollars after the Dow's sharp fall to hit its highest level in more than six months. As the meltdown on European bourses took hold Monday, both Germany and Britain attempted to inject calm into markets. A spokeswoman for the German Economics Ministry said the slump in China would likely have a limited impact on the German economy, while Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne pointed to the Chinese government's focus on growth. "I'm reasonably confident," Osborne said during a visit to Stockholm. "Although I don't think we can be unaffected by what happens in China, I don't think it's going cause immediate shock problems in Europe."
