Nobody was spotted jumping out of any windows on Wall Street.

But it was still a bruising day on the markets, with billions of dollars of market capitalization vanishing as a result of the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, a basket of 30 large-cap companies, closed the day down 2,013.76 points to finish at 23,851.02.

That was by far the largest point drop in the history of the New York Stock Exchange.

However, this didn't match the largest drop in percentage in history. Back on October 19, 1987, the Dow went into a freefall, plunging 22.61 percent.

The next largest drop in percentage terms occurred on October 28, 1929, when the index plummeted 12.82 percent in a day. That was followed by another 11.73 percent fall on the following day.

Today, the Dow was down by 7.79 percent.

That marked the biggest single-day percentage decline since the global economic meltdown on October 15, 2008.

Among the falling stocks today were Dow Inc. (-21.7 percent), Chevron (-15.4 percent), Caterpillar Inc. (-14.3 percent), Boeing (-13.4 percent), ExxonMobil (-12.3 percent), American Express (-9.19 percent), Apple (-7.91 percent), and Microsoft (-6.78 percent).

Oil prices plunged as well on the expectation of reduced demand.

West Texas Intermediate crude oil fell more than US$10 to US$31.13 per barrel. Goldman Sachs has warned investors to be prepared for oil prices to fall to US$20 per barrel.

Natural gas prices were only off slightly. But they had already crashed by nearly 40 percent over the past year, according to Oilprice.com.

The best-performing company in this group of 30 large-cap stocks was Walmart, which was off by only 0.06 percent.

In Toronto, the S&P/TSX Composite Index had an even sharper drop, falling 10.27 percent.