KEY POINTS:
The headache arising from the global credit crunch today continued to dog the local sharemarket.
With Wall Street off around 2 per cent, the local benchmark NZSX-50 index fell 25.6 points to 4051.5 at 10.20am.
Falls outnumbered rises 25 to 17 on 65 stocks traded. Volume was light at $30 million.
Top stock Telecom lost 6c to 420 while its Australian counterpart, Telstra, dropped 12c to 530.
No 2 stock Fletcher Building lost 15c to 1170 and No 3 Contact Energy was down 1c to 890.
Australasian brewer Lion Nathan was down 76c to 990.
Despite the market fall, stocks in the top 50 were mixed. Sky City, due to reveal more about potential bidders this week, was down 3c to 515.
Those to rise included, AMP, up 6c, Hallenstein Glasson, 4c to 449, and Sanford, 5c to 425.
Fisher & Paykel Appliances fell another 4c to 340 after losing 5c yesterday.
Steel & Tube fell 5c to 200 and finance company Dorchester Pacific fell 2c to 85c. Xero was down 3c to 80.
There were two big moves on light volume among the penny dreadfuls. Media Techonology rose 2c, 63 per cent, to 5c, while Applefields also rose 2c to 8c.
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On Wall Street, stocks fell on investor concern about rising mortgage defaults and credit market losses and uncertainty about consumer spending during the holiday shopping season.
Leading the decline were financial services companies, including Citigroup Inc, the largest US bank, which fell more than 4 per cent, making the stock the biggest drag on the Dow and S&P 500.
The S&P, Dow and Nasdaq indices all unofficially ended the session more than 10 per cent below their 52-week highs.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 237.44 points, or 1.83 per cent, to 12,743.44. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 33.49 points, or 2.32 per cent, to 1407.21 and the Nasdaq Composite Index fell 55.61 points, or 2.14 per cent, to 2540.99.
- NZPA