Markets CRUSHED: Here's What You Need To know

Joe Weisenthal | Aug. 11, 2010, 4:00 PM |

A day after the Fed made its first steps down the path of quantitative easing 2.0, the market woke up with a huge hangover, and never got over it.

But first, the scoreboard:

Dow: -260
NASDAQ: -67
S&P 500: -31

And now, the top stories of the day:

• The "day" actually started around 8:00 PM ET on Tuesday. That's when a selloff on the Nikkei quickly turned into a rout. We wrote about it just as it happened here. Coinciding with that was a severe selloff in US futures that would not slow down.

• That pain continued to Europe, which bizarrely experienced a relapse of the sovereign debt panic we haven't seen in several weeks. This time Ireland was the source of the worries, and the euro plunged all night. Of course, the huge winner in currency-land was the Japanese yen, which surged to a 15-year high today. That currency surge is catching the attention of the Japanese finance minister, who has been jawboning more and more about intervention.

• US economic news was minimal today. A wide expansion in the trade deficit didn't help things, however, as it prompted analysts to revise downward already ugly looking GDP numbers.

• The selloff continued to rumble on throughout the day, with nary a bounce at any point. Markets ended basically at the lows of the day.

• Not surprisingly, all of the big industrial commodities were down. Gold had an eerily quiet day, and remains moored at $1200.

• Tomorrow comes the weekly initial claims report, which is a reason to be nervous.