Market crashes on more corporate failures

Indian markets tumbled post sun-outage break on dismal cues from global markets. Players frenziedly cut positions on fears there will be more corporate failures and the US bailout plan may fail to resolve the credit crisis.

The failure of US financial services sector is now spilling over to European companies. Fortis, the largest Belgian financial service firm, recently filed for the bailout. Bradford & Bingley Britain's biggest lender to landlords may also be taken over.

At 2:11 pm, National Stock Exchange's 50-share Nifty dropped 4.33 per cent to 3812 and BSE Sensex was at 12490, down 4.67 per cent.

Nifty October futures was at a premium of 9 points to the spot and it added 35 lakh shares in open interest. Rising open interest coupled with narrowing premium indicates short build up in the contract.

On BSE, all sectors were in red. Realty, banking, consumer durables and IT were the worst hit sectors.

Top losers of BSE were ICICI Bank (-11.41%), Jaiprakash Associates (-12.39%), Reliance Infra (-7.43%), DLF Ltd (-8.80%) and Satyam Computers (-8.25%).

There were no gainers on Sensex. On NSE, SAIL (0.97%), Hero Honda (0.65%), Cipla (0.57%) and GAIL (0.42%) were marginally up.

Meanwhile, stocks dropped in Europe and Asia on rising numbers of corporates awaiting bailout.