Live: ASX tumbles 2.3pc on open after recession fears crunch Wall Street and global markets

Good morning and welcome to another week on the ABC markets and finance blog.

Stephen Letts from ABC business team limbering up for a blow-by-blow coverage of the day’s events, where every post is hopefully a winner, but none should be construed as financial advice.

Global markets embraced the Olympics on Friday – unfortunately the competition of choice was synchronised diving.

Everything went spiralling down together to close the week – twisting, turning and ultimately ending underwater.

The ASX is poised to join the belly flop brigade with pre-judging on the futures market pencilling in a score of -1.5% for the opening.

Team US – the Dow Jones ( -1.5%), the S&P (-1.8%) and the Nasdaq (-2.4%) – tumbled after worse than expected jobs data morphed expectations of a soft landing into predictions of a painful recession.

The small cap Russell 2000 that had been outperforming the big end of town weeks recently was hammered back to a three-week low, down 3.5%.

There certainly wasn’t any applause from portfolio manager at Villere & Co, Lamar Villere, who didn’t try to sugar coat things with the usual “that’s terrific, it means rate cuts” schtick.

“Obviously the jobs number is the big headline, but we seem to have officially entered at least a rational world where bad economic news is read as bad rather than bad economic news is read as good,” Mr Villere told Reuters.

“The Fed is going to cut and we’re all sort of adjusted to that, that is sort of established. Now it’s more like hey, did they wait too long? Do we have a recession on our hands?”

Adding to investor anxiety were big earnings misses from some tech darlings with Amazon down 8.8% and chip-maker Intel crashing 26%.

The ugly performance was repeated across Europe (-2.6%), although that was not quite as bad a Japan’s final effort on Friday (-5.8%).

Oil (-3.4%) hit an eight-month low and US 10-year treasury yields dropped to their lowest level since late last year.

In keeping with the Olympic spirit, gold remained relatively in demand, dipping just 0.1%, and that was largely due to some late session profit taking.

Overall, gold gained 1.8% over the week and is just some loose change off its record high.

The big question for the day may well be which board will the ASX dive off – hopefully not the 10-metre one.