By Chuck Mikolajczak

NEW YORK (Reuters – U.S. stocks fell Thursday with its largest daily percentage decline in over two weeks. Investors shifted into defensive sectors and to safe havens, such as gold and bonds, amid growing geopolitical tensions between Washington, Russia, and Ukraine.

U.S. President Joe Biden stated that Russia had every intention of invading Ukraine in the coming days. He was also preparing an excuse to support it.

Russia accuses Biden of inflaming tensions. Biden released a strong-worded note stating that Washington is ignoring security requests and was threatening unspecified “military technical measures.”

Wall Street was particularly hard hit by the Wall Street growth-oriented technology sector and the communications services sector. As U.S. Treasury yields fell, financials declined too.

Inflation is being fought with more uncertainty as a result of developments in Ukraine.

“There’s a lot of nervousness out there and as we approach the weekend nothing’s been settled between Russia and Ukraine,” said Michael James, managing director, equity trading at Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles.

“The persistent weakness of growth names is an indication that sellers continue to overtake buyers in all stocks.”

Wall Street was led by the consumer staples and defensive utilities sectors. Staples saw a boost from an increase of 4.01% in Walmart (NYSE) following record-breaking holiday sales.

The fell 622.24 points, or 1.78%, to 34,312.03, the S&P 500 lost 94.75 points, or 2.12%, to 4,380.26 and the dropped 407.38 points, or 2.88%, to 13,716.72.

While the Dow’s drop was the largest daily percentage decrease since Nov. 30, the Nasdaq saw its greatest percentage drop since February 3.

Nvidia (NASDAQ) plunged 7.51 percent as concerns about crypto-market exposure and flat gross margins overshadowed its positive current quarter revenue forecast. This helped to give the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index its first daily fall this week.

TripAdvisor Inc. (NASDAQ) suffered a 2.50% loss after its hotel-search website operator reported a unexpected fourth-quarter loss. Albemarle (NYSE:) Corp fell 19.91% because the annual forecast of the lithium producer was for lower earnings.

Big banks like JPMorgan Chase (NYSE) saw their bond yields drop as a result of risk aversion. Morgan Stanley All of the ground lost by Bank of America (NYSE 🙂 and Goldman Sachs (NYSE 🙂 Goldman Sachs (NYSE 🙂 Wells Fargo (NYSE: ) declined despite positive outlooks by lenders.

Another beneficiary was gold, which reached an eight-month peak of $1,900.99 per ounce.

DoorDash Inc jumped 10.69%, among other major movers, after it reported positive quarterly results as the food delivery market showed no signs of slowing.

Hasbro Inc (NASDAQ:) gained 2.09% after activist investor Alta Fox Capital Management nominated five directors to the toymaker’s board and urged changes including a spinoff of its unit housing games such as “Dungeons & Dragons”.

On the NYSE, declining issues outnumbered advancing by a ratio of 2.81 to 1. While on Nasdaq, a ratio of 3.63 to 1 favors decliners.

The S&P 500 posted 6 new 52-week highs and 19 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 27 new highs and 249 new lows.