(Jason Devaun / CC BY-ND 2.0)

To start off 2016, U.S. stocks suffered their worst first market week of a new year since record-keeping began.

The rich are still rich, however.

The Guardian reports:

The Standard & Poor’s 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 6% and 6.2%, respectively, in the biggest ever fall for the first five days of January and the worst for any week since September 2011.

US markets, which have been suffering big falls since Wednesday, continued to decline on Friday despite the release of data showing better than expected US jobs growth in December.

The losses amounted to “more than the estimated US student loan debt and 12% of the US debt”, noted Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones indices.

The US stock declines follow drops in markets across most of the world sparked by renewed concerns about the health of the Chinese economy, the world’s second-largest.

This week’s declines wiped more than $2.3tn off the value of global stock markets, according to the S&P Global Broad Market index (BMI).

Read more here.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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