http://192.168.2.6/english/华尔街市场面临崩溃.rm

It's the worst one-day sell-off on Wall Street since after the 9.11 attacks. Stock prices plunged today across the board and around the world. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down about 416 points at the closing bell and at one point it fell unusually fast, in part because of a computer glitch. CNN's Ali Velshi is in New York with more on what's driving the market down. Ali, one of the big factors was a big drop in China overnight that caused the US market to drop. The Asia/ market is now beginning to open for the next day there. Are we seeing anything that we should comfort us or things that should alarm us?

Now in fact we should probably a little be a little bothered. Tokyo opened 15 minutes ago we are now getting word that the market is down almost 4% now. So, we are feeling the reverb of what's started in Asia, back in Asia. Within an hour and a half, we'll see Shanghai open again which is where it started and then in two hours we'll see Hong Kong, then in a few hours London and Frankfurt will be back, too. US markets what we have here is a combination, a force that drove the market down for the first several hours of the day. There was no surprise, John, all the evidence or /economic numbers, there was a sell-off in China. We expected / markets to be lower, but then all of a sudden, at about 2:59 pm, we went from a 300-point loss which was a big deal, anyway, to a 400-point loss within a minute and then a 500-point loss all the way to 546 points. These all happened inside of three minutes. At the close of the market at 3:59 to 4 o'clock, there was /widespread booing on the floor of the exchange you can hear it there. These traders who said / something was wrong, this is not a normal sell-off. Within an hour, we had acknowledgements from the Dow Jones and the New York Stock Exchange that there were some kind of a glitch now we don't know whether that glitch was in the accounting or in the trading, but it seemed to have accelerated the effect(ive) today. Well, we were ending up with there as you can see a 416-point loss at the close. It's a major loss for the Dow, the thing that we are watching for is whether this continues to have an effect around the world or whether this gets moderated. The moment the news isn't good, Tokyo is opened with almost a 4% loss, John.

And Ali, you see we don't know a lot about this glitch. Have we heard from market officials? Are they confident that they at least figure it out to the degree that if it's another tough day tomorrow we won't have another glitch?

Well, we've, we've. They are confident of it. There was definitely a glitch in the tabulation. They, they, they couldn't keep up with the trades, so what happened is at one point the Dow Jones which is not /the New York Stock Exchange, they tabulated the results. The Dow decided to switch to its backup system and in doing so, all of that, that trading that was happening caught up to it and you saw this drop within three minutes.

They're saying the drop should've happened over 40 or 50 minutes. /It happened over 3 minutes. Well, we are not clear on it, we are pressing for an answer from the New York Stock Exchange, was there a trading problem? Was there a compute glitch that caused the acceleration of this? This sell-off is very unusual to see a four and five hundred-point drop on the Dow Jones without very clear evidence that there is a problem in the economy. We don't have any evidence, John.