Welcome to Forbes Talks. I'm John Dobis joined by my Forbes colleague Hank Tucker,

markets reporter and money and investing extraordinaire. We're talking today about the very steep stock market sell-off occurring on Monday, August 5th, which follows up on the heels of Thursday and Friday, which were sharply down days for U.S. stocks.

Overnight, the Japanese Nique Index had its worst single day since 1987, down 12%.

South Korea Copse was down 10%.

These are extremely large one day moves that you don't usually see in a stock market.

So, Hank, what is behind all of this? We know that the interest rates in the United States are on the verge of coming down. The Fed declined to do it in July. It seemed like everything was okay on Wednesday and the bottom

fell out on Thursday. What's your read about what's been going on?

Yeah, Thursday was a pretty weekday and then I think the the job the jobs report that came out on Friday that showed a weaker jobs market,

that the unemployment rate was higher than expected at 4.3 percent,

spooked investors as well into Friday and then they had all weekend to get a little more

anxious and worked up I think and and today at the open it was down as much as 4%.

You know now as today's going on it's gotten a little bit better and now we're only down a little

over 2% and the S&P 500 compared to some of those really bad crashes in the in Japan and

South Korea that we're seeing overseas.

So, you know, overall, as market crashes go, this is, you know, pretty tame, obviously

two or three percent is pretty, you know, not nothing to sneeze at, but we're still only down 8% or so from the

all-time highs of three weeks ago.

But that's also making investors and experts I'm talking to,

you know, not really willing to buy yet.

They don't really think it's much of a buy opportunity.

The violations are still pretty high.

So, you know, we'll see how long this lasts.

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