Delta variant of Covid-19: Week start to US

The stock prices in New York got off to a bad start to the new stock market week on Monday.

In particular, the rapid spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus has hit investors hard on the stomach.

The concern that the variant could slow global economic growth put pressure on the courses.

The American health authority CDC, for example, warned against traveling to the country in view of the sharp increase in coronavirus infections in Great Britain.

That pushed the leading index Dow Jones Industrial down by 2.09 percent to 33,962.04 points.

It fell below the 34,000 mark, its lowest level in almost a month.

For the market-wide S&P 500, it fell by 1.59 percent to 4258.49 points.

The technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 held up a little better with a minus of 0.90 percent to 14,549.09 points.

The delta variant of the corona virus triggered a flight of investors into safe investments, said Edward Moya of the trading house Oanda.

"Global economic concerns are mounting," the analyst wrote in a market commentary.

Investors would have avoided risky investments such as stocks, commodities and cryptocurrencies and instead opted for bonds.

Ten-year US government bonds rose to their highest level in around five months on Monday.

The spread of the delta variant fueled concerns among investors about new restrictions, for example in travel and tourism.

Boeing's shares fell nearly five percent at the Dow end.

Airline papers also came under pressure.

American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Jetblue lost three to a good four percent.

The shares of hotel operators and cruise lines also fell back.

The prices of the American oil industry came under pressure after the oil cartel Opec and its partner countries (Opec +) agreed on a significant increase in oil production over the weekend in view of the global economic recovery.

As the oil price fell sharply, the shares of ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips lost between 2.7 and 3.4 percent.

With a takeover project, the video conferencing service Zoom moved into the focus of investors.

Zoom wants to take over the US company Five9, a cloud software provider for customer communication, for 14.7 billion US dollars (around 12.5 billion euros) and thus position itself more broadly.

The acquisition is to be financed with own shares.

The Five9 management is behind the deal, which - if realized - would be the largest in the history of Zoom.

While Zoom shares fell 2.2 percent, Five9's shares rose nearly 6 percent.

The euro remained at the $ 1.18 mark in later US currency trading and cost $ 1.1797 at the close of trading on Wall Street.

The European Central Bank had previously set the reference rate at 1.1766 (Friday: 1.1802) dollars.

The dollar had thus cost 0.8499 (0.8473) euros.

On the bond market, the futures contract for ten-year Treasuries (T-Note-Future) rose by 0.57 percent to 134.60 points. The yield on ten-year government bonds fell accordingly to 1.19 percent.