Wall Street indexes end lower as Middle East conflict fans inflation fears

Wall Street indexes end lower as Middle East conflict fans inflation fears

By Caroline Valetkevitch and Johann M Cherian

Tue March 3, 2026  

Yesterday on the third day of the war, the sentiment on Wall Street was that the crisis and expected oil spike was nothing to worry about as it was going to be “very temporary” to last a few days or at most weeks.  On this the fourth day, sentiment has taken a 180 as now the war is expected to last quite a while and energy spikes will cause an inflation surge. It was a thorough rout today on all three indexes but it started out a great deal worse. At 10:30 a.m., the Dow was down some 1300 points, the Nasdaq down over 600 and the S&P, which rarely goes into 3-digits, a whopping 170.  

Then a gradual recovery, enough to avert what would have been one of the worst days in history but not nearly enough to stop very considerable losses. The VIX spiked almost 10% by close but was up over 30% at 10:30 a.m.  The entire Middle East has flared up and it does not appear that there’s an end game.  This will likely become one of the most intense “wait-and-see” periods in recent history. The only good news per today’s expert is that “the market’s reaction to the conflict so far is very tame,” suggesting that much worse was expected and that there is still a great deal of flexibility and risk tolerance. Volume came in at 24.4 billion, way above the 20.2 average.  

DJ: 48,904.78  -73.14          NAS: 22,748.86  +80.65         S&P: 6,881.62  +2.74             3/2

DJ: 48,501.27  -403.51        NAS: 22,516.69  -232.17        S&P: 6,816.63  -64.99           3/3

Tue 3-3-26 4:04 pm Wall Street indexes end lower as Middle East conflict fans inflation fears | Reuters