Wall St fails to join the party

Wall Street ignored the euphoria in Washington and suffered its biggest ever inauguration day slide.

The Dow Jones Industrial Index fell four per cent, or 332 points to 7,949.09, the steepest fall for two months, over fresh concerns about the health of America's banking industry. The huge sell-off hit London where the FTSE 100 opened this morning down 61.38 points at 4030.02. Barclays was the biggest victim, falling 19.7p to 53.2p, knocking just over a quarter off its value. Sterling slid again against the dollar.

Richard Cripps, of brokers Stifel Nicolaus, said: "There's just tremendous fear and uncertainty in the banking sector."

Some analysts said they were disappointed by the absence of specific measures to tackle the financial crisis in the inauguration speech.

Major banks led the slump with Bank of America down 28 per cent, JP Morgan 20.7 per cent lower and Citigroup off 20 per cent. State Street Corp, the world's largest institutional money manager, made a quarterly loss of $10 billion.