Early August 2024 when stocks hit the skids so far this morning the selling continues

I'm David Brancatia US stock index futures are pointing to another sharply down day here in the U.S.

The stocks around the world also down sharply amid worries. The downturn the U.S. Federal Reserve

has engineered might lead not to a soft landing but to a recession.

The most dramatic sell-off today so far is in Japan where the Nikk Index closed down

nearly 13 percent, its steepest drop since the 1987 stock market crash.

Mariko Ooy with our newsroom partners at the BBC is following this from

Singapore. She says it's partly about Japanese interest rates going up as US rates seem headed down.

The Bank of Japan last Wednesday raised the cost of borrowing 0.25%, which sounds very low compared to the rest of the world, but the whole point was they were trying to prop up the value of the Japanese yen because the Japanese currency has been falling sharply against the US dollar and it was making the cost of imports for

things like fuel and food more expensive. Also of course last Friday we had a very

weak US job state are coming out and that started concerns among some

investors that the world's biggest economy could be headed for recession.

Meanwhile European indicators are down sharply as well with London's 100 share index now down 2.4

percent. Frankfurt is down 2.6 percent and it's still about two and a half hours

before US markets open officially.

What we do have is stock index futures pointing to another major sell-off today.

NASDAQ futures down 4.5% now, Dow futures down 782 points or 2 percent. Here's Marketplace's Nova

Safo. The Federal Reserve signaled last week that he was poised to cut interest

rates in September, ending a more than two-year tightening cycle.

At first, investors were cheered, but then came last week's jobs report.

The unemployment rate had risen nearly an entire percentage point compared to its recent low.

There's some debate whether the report includes some statistical noise, but still,

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