US STOCKS-Dow heads for worst day since 1987 as record bull run ends

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* Airlines, cruise liners tank on Europe travel restrictions
* Trump's travel curbs send global stocks into bear market
* U.S. stock markets halted for second time this week
* Boeing set for worst week in history
* Indexes sink: Dow 3.46%, S&P 3.30%, Nasdaq 3.36%

(Updates to early afternoon)
By Medha Singh and Sanjana Shivdas
March 12 (Reuters) - The Dow Jones index was on course on
Thursday for its worst performance since Wall Street's "Black
Monday" crash of 1987, as President Donald Trump's move to curb
travel from Europe added to growing corporate distress over the
coronavirus pandemic.
Trump announced several steps to help small businesses, but
failed to convince traders he would be able to blunt the
outbreak's impact on the domestic economy, ending the longest
bull run in Wall Street history and driving the Dow into a bear
market. With all three main indexes down more than 3%, and record
numbers of stocks hitting 52-week lows, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq
looked set to follow at the close.
Airline stocks .SPCOMAIR tanked 11%, while cruise liner
Carnival Corp CCL.N plummeted after its Princess Cruises said
it would suspend global operations for two months. Boeing Co BA.N fell another 13% as J.P.Morgan abandoned
its long-term backing for the planemaker's shares, a day after
the company signaled major cutbacks and drew on a large chunk of
additional reserve cash.
The company, one of Wall Street's most influential, has lost
nearly 40% of its value this week and its recent actions now
look representative of the fear infecting corporate America over
the outbreak's financial impact.
United Airlines UAL.O tumbled 12.4% after saying it had
borrowed $2 billion to cope with the unprecedented disruption to
the industry from sweeping business travel and holiday
cancellations. "The economy is going to grind to a halt in the next month
and the recession risk is real now," said Zhiwei Ren, managing
director at Penn Mutual Asset Management in Horsham,
Pennsylvania.
Wall Street's fear gauge .VIX jumped to its highest since
the 2008 financial crisis.
The MSCI world equity index .MIWD00000PUS also crashed
into a bear market in early trading, with declines deepening
after the European Central Bank held off on cutting interest
rates, sending the pan-European STOXX 600 index .STOXX to its
worst day on record. .EU
Expectations are running high for a second rate cut by the
Federal Reserve this month, but analysts question whether that
would address investors' underlying concerns. US/
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York briefly offered some
support for shares by saying it would increase Treasury
purchases and introduce new repo operations. That bounce faded
quickly. "There's very, very little (the Fed) can do so if we got
into recession; monetary policies are not going to help us too
much," Ren said.
Worries about corporate credit are growing as prices of bond
funds take a hit and companies start to draw on existing credit
lines. Trading on Wall Street was halted minutes after the opening
bell with the S&P 500 sliding 7% and triggering a 15-minute
cutout as traders fled to the perceived safety of bonds and the
Japanese yen.
At 1:05 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI was
down 814.74 points, or 3.46%, at 22,738.48, while the S&P 500
.SPX was down 90.55 points, or 3.30%, at 2,650.83. The Nasdaq
Composite .IXIC was down 267.42 points, or 3.36%, at 7,684.63.
In a month of chaos on markets, the Dow Jones has now handed
back all of the past two years' gains, but remains around 14%
above levels from Nov 8, 2016, a day before Donald Trump was
elected as the 46th President of the United States.
Declining issues outnumbered advancers almost 18-to-1 on the
NYSE and 12-to-1 on the Nasdaq.