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8B – Daily News – Thursday, July 1, 2010 Furniture Depot 235 So. Main St., Red Bluff 527-1657 MON.-FRI. 9:00-6:00 SAT. 9:00-5:00 • SUN. 11:00-5:00 NEW YORK (AP) — The stock market closed out a painful second quarter Wednesday and left investors with heavy losses and far more doubts about the economy than they had just months ago. Furniture 0% 12 month financing up to50%-60% off Retail prices on selected items Stocks had their worst quarterly performance since the financial crisis. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index, considered by many professional investors to be the best measure of the mar- ket’s health, lost 11.9 per- cent, while the Dow Jones industrial average lost 10 percent. Both indexes are at their lows for 2010. Meanwhile, Treasury notes and bonds soared dur- ing the quarter, driving interest rates sharply lower, as investors turning away from stocks sought a place where their money would be safe. In the early days of the quarter, the yield on the Treasury’s 10-year note, used as a base for setting rates on consumer loans including mortgages, was close to 4 percent. By the quarter’s end, it had fallen to 2.94 percent. On the last day of the April-June period, the Dow lost 96 points, and all the big indexes were down about 1 percent. Using the S&P 500 as a benchmark, stocks had their worst quarterly loss since the fourth quarter of 2008, when the index plunged 22.6 percent. For the first half, the index is down 7.8 percent, its worst first-half showing since the 13.8 per- cent it loss at the start of 2002. Investors spent much of the quarter repeating the same questions they had a year earlier: Can the econo- my continue its recovery? Analysts say the answer most likely is yes but that traders are realizing it won’t be easy. After reaching its highest point since the financial cri- sis in April, the market began its plunging in May when investors grew fearful that Greece wouldn’t make good on debt payments. Its economy represents only a tiny part of the European Union but traders worried that bad debt would trip up the world’s financial system the way it did after the col- lapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Those fears morphed into con- cerns about how much countries have been spend- ing to revive growth. Investors who still feel burned by the losses of the financial crisis also seized on mixed economic news as an indication that the rebound was sputtering. Now, investors are trying to determine how the recovery will play out. Economist Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advi- sors says investors are dis- appointed the economy is not growing as strongly as they had anticipated earlier this year amid talk of a so- called V-shaped recovery, in which the economy rebounds sharply after its big drop. But he thinks investors have sold too much. ‘‘They’re thinking, ’Gee, if we’re not getting a V- shaped recovery, we’ll get a double dip.’ They’ve gone from euphoria to depres- sion,’’ Naroff says. ‘‘The reality is somewhere in between.’’ Some analysts said the rocky second quarter was to be expected, given the mar- ket’s history of recovering from big drops like the one stocks suffered during the 2008-09 financial crisis. Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist of U.S. equity research at Standard & Poor’s, dates the end of the latest reces- sion to August of last year. That means the now-com- plete second quarter is the third full quarter since the recession’s end. He noted that stocks drops are not uncommon in such a peri- od; in fact, they happened following three of the four recessions prior to the latest one. ‘‘Investors anticipate ATTENTION TRAX & ParaTRAX Riders There is no TRAX or ParaTRAX service on: July 1, 2, 3, or 5th Regular service starts on July 6th what’s going to happen (in a recovery), and sometimes Savings throughout store Stocks end rough quarter with more questions Wall Street vall cautions his data is more a curiosity than con- clusive. The quarter’s final day saw a last-hour selloff that has become standard oper- ating procedure, especially when a big economic num- ber like the government’s June employment report due out Friday is immi- nent. The Dow fell 96.28, or 1 percent, to 9,774.02. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 10.53, or 1 per- cent, to 1,030.71, while the Nasdaq composite index fell 25.94, or 1.2 percent, to 2,109.24. Losing stocks outnum- bered gainers on the New York Stock Exchange by about 2 to 1. Consolidated volume came to 5.3 billion shares, compared with 6.3 billion on Tuesday. As investors pulled out of stocks throughout the quarter, U.S. Treasurys and gold were big beneficiaries. The perceived safety of the two helped push bond and gold prices higher. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, went below 3 percent for the first time in more than a year on Tuesday, falling to 2.97 per- cent. It came off that low Wednesday, rising to 2.94 percent. they over-anticipate,’’ Sto- vall said. After a couple of quarters pass, investors go through a ‘‘reality readjust- ment.’’ And apparently they’re still not through at that point: Prices also tend to fall in the fourth quarter after recessions end, though Sto- Gold rose $1.70 to $1,244.10 an ounce Wednesday, and is up near- ly 12 percent for the quarter. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 6.47, or 1 percent, to 609.49. 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