• Apple, NVIDIA, Tesla, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and others suffered declines in stock prices following a panic that gripped investors across the globe.
• A number of coincidental events have led to fears that a recession is looming for the United States.
• These fears have affected stocks in India, Japan, and even South Africa.

Several major tech stocks tumbled on Monday following a volatile moment for international markets. The Nasdaq 100 Index fell more than four percent and Japanese stocks crashed to a level not seen since the Fukushima nuclear meltdown catastrophe in 2011.

Apple, NVIDIA, Tesla, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon all fell by more than seven percent, with some falling 11 percent following the weekend. Bloomberg and other analysts are blaming a precarious US economy on the situation.

It wasn’t helped that NVIDIA also announced last week that the launch of its Blackwell super AI chips had been delayed by three months or longer, hurting its share price and dampening investor fervour over the company, which became the most valuable firm in the world this year on the back of generative AI madness.

Meanwhile, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway sold off a large piece of stock in Apple, about 390 million shares in the tech giant. While Buffett, as per The Guardian, has said in the past that investors shouldn’t put too much into his company’s quarterly gains or losses, the sell-off happened at the precise time to spook investors and again stoke fears of a looming economic crisis.

All of a sudden, investors became concerned that the US government was lagging in introducing new policies to help arrest the descent of the US economy, which caused a global sell-off of stocks as investors sought to save their money by picking up bonds.

Making matters worse, the US Dollar plunged over the weekend as newly released US employment data pointed to a worse-than-expected picture in the country’s job markets, raising fears of a looming recession. Unemployment rose to 4.3 percent.

Alongside tech stocks, cryptocurrencies also took a massive hit, as Ether suffered its biggest fall in over a decade and Bitcoin – which had been making recent recoveries amid hopes of a halving – tumbled back down to lower than $51 000.

Global markets have been affected, with top stocks in Japan sliding by double-digits, but the Yen managed to maintain its strength following news that the Bank of Japan was planning to increase interest rates.

India was particularly struck, with investors losing over R300 000 in a single trading session following the tanking of major regional stock indexes like Sensex and Nifty 50.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange also fell slightly according to a MoneyWeb report.

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