Reuters is reporting that the threat of an Iraq war had drained some 1.1 trillion US dollars from the value of the US stock market, preceding the onset of the US war against Iraq.
The S&P 500 index rallied 7.5 percent this week in anticipation of a swift conclusion of the war. But researchers say the rising probability of a conflict had already knocked 15 percent off where the stock market would have been if the US had not escalated the Iraq issue late last year.
Research made by Stanford and Harvard universities said that most of the losses came in shares of consumer goods companies, airlines and technologies, as well as those relying on discretionary spending.
They said that by mid-March, 95-percent of the war's impact on the US stock market had already been priced in and 1.1 trillion of the nation's wealth had already disappeared.
|
