Stocks Extend Losses, With Dow Falling More Than 700 Points

Updated at 3 p.m. ET

The stock market continued to lose ground Monday after Friday's steep drop, with the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 700 points in afternoon trading.

Market participants were focused on the threat of higher inflation after Friday's jobs report showed a pickup in wages, which portends more interest rate increases from the Federal Reserve.

"I think we are in a changing environment where it looks like we're going to have a bit higher inflation and so that has markets on edge," Gus Faucher, chief economist of the PNC Financial Services Group, told NPR's Windsor Johnston. "And I think volatility is likely to be higher in 2018 than it was in 2017."

At 3 p.m., the Dow was down more than 770 points, or 3 percent. Monday's losses came on top of Friday's 666-point drop in the blue-chip index, resulting in the worst week for the index in two years.

In the past week, both the Dow and the S&P 500 have now lost over 5 percent from their recent all-time highs.

Other stock indexes around the world also fell Monday, including London's FTSE 100, which closed down 1.5 percent, and Japan's Nikkei, which fell 2.5 percent.