U.S., world stock markets slide as panic in China spreads

Global stock markets fell for a sixth day Thursday as another collapse in China’s ailing share market spread like contagion across the world. It all began on Thursday in a flash. Chinese stocks traded for less than 30 minutes, slumping 7 percent before triggering the second emergency market closure this week and generating talk of a crisis. In the United States, stocks were down more than 2 percent by mid-afternoon. The Dow Jones industrial average, which tracks 30 blue-chip stocks, and the Standard & Poor’s 500, a broader measure of the market, were both down about 2 percent. The tech-heavy Nasdaq was suffering the deepest losses, falling nearly 3 percent.