Stocks slide; S&P 500 enters bear market

Indexes opened sharply lower as traders worried that Greece could be edging closer to default. They turned mixed by midday, shortly after Bernanke finished speaking to a Congressional panel, but slipped again in the early afternoon.

At 3:15 p.m., the Standard and Poor’s 500 index was down 20 points, or 1.8 percent, at 1,079. It reached a peak of 1,363 on April 29.

The Dow Jones was down 218 points, or 2 percent, to 10,448. It had been down as many as 250 points at 10 a.m., just as Bernanke started speaking. The Dow is down 18 percent from its peak, just shy of the threshold for a bear market.

Bank of America Corp. led the Dow lower with a 5.3 percent drop. American Express lost 4.8 percent, and General Electric Co. slid 3.5 percent.

The technology-focused Nasdaq 100 was down 32 points, or 1.4 percent, at 2,303. The Russell 2000 index of small companies gained 4, or 0.7 percent, to 613. Analysts said the bounce was likely due to steep losses in the index the day before as investors picked up stocks that they considered cheap. The Russell index fell 5.4 percent Monday.

Markets have been reacting nervously to worries about Europe’s debt crisis. European finance ministers suggested at a meeting Tuesday that holders of Greek debt may be required to take larger losses than originally thought, which would hurt banks that hold Greek bonds. Greece has said it wouldn’t be able to make budget cuts it had agreed to as part of a deal to receive emergency loans.

“Europe is the center point of all of this,” said Paul Zemsky, head of asset allocation at ING Investment Management. “The big fear in the market is that company earnings are not sustainable and that Europe’s problems are going to spread into the U.S. banking system.”

In testimony before Congress, Bernanke said the economy is weaker than the central bank expected and that poor job growth continues to undercut consumer confidence. He warned Congress that deep spending cuts may impede a recovery.

Bernanke also said the central bank is ready to take more steps to stimulate the economy. That could mean another round of asset purchases, a tactic known as quantitative easing, noted David Ader, chief government bond strategist at CRT Capital Group.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 1.80 percent from 1.78 percent late Monday. It briefly went as low as 1.72 percent around 10 a.m., near its record low of 1.71 percent reached Sept. 22. Bond yields fall when their prices rise.

Analysts said Europe’s debt problems overshadowed signs that the U.S. economy continues to grow slowly. “Collectively, the data here in the U.S. hasn’t been that bad, but investors are looking at Europe and saying ‘I don’t care what the U.S. fundamentals are when we’ve got much bigger problems overseas that may eventually wash onto our shores,'” said Phil Orlando, chief stock strategist at Federated Investors.

The S&P index has fallen every month since April on mounting concerns about the strength of the U.S. economy and the possibility that the debt crisis in Europe could get worse. The stock market is thought to be forward-looking, reflecting investors’ views of the economy in 6 to 9 months.

The S&P 500 has anticipated all 11 recessions in the U.S. economy since 1948, according to Sam Stovall, chief equity strategist at Standard & Poor’s. Stocks usually begin their descent about 7 months before a recession starts and drop an average of 30 percent, he said.

In corporate news, Bank of America Corp. lost 5 percent to $5.24 as investors continued to be troubled by its exposure to soured mortgages securities and a several-day outage of its website. The company’s stock lost 9 percent Monday to $5.53, a level not seen since 2009.

Apple Inc. slid 5 percent to $355.24 after the company unveiled a faster iPhone that fell short of the radical upgrade that some analysts had predicted.

European indexes also declined sharply. Benchmark indexes in Germany, France, and Spain each lost more than 2 percent.