Stocks Are Hammered by Weak Earnings Reports Nobody was expecting this earnings season to be great. But investors didn't expect the bad news from corporate bellwethers to be this bad, either. Stocks plunged Tuesday, making it one of the worst days on Wall Street so far this year and sending the major indexes to their lowest levels since early September. Big-name companies reported weak quarterly earnings and lowered their forecasts for the rest of the year. The Dow sank 253 points, or almost 2 percent, to 13,093 in midday trading. The Dow's biggest decline so far this year was 274 points. That was June 1, the day the government released an ominously weak jobs report. Other indexes also fell sharply. The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 23 points to 1,411 and the Nasdaq composite index was off 33 points at 2,983. The Nasdaq hasn't closed below 3,000 since Aug. 6. Companies of all stripes signaled that the economy is far from healed, and that demand isn't what it was a year ago. DuPont, 3M, UPS and Xerox all missed analysts' expectations for revenue. Because of their global footprint and variety of products and services, those companies augur how the world economy is performing. Their revenue is important because consumer spending drives more than 70 percent of the U.S. economy. The Federal Reserve has been trying to drive the economy by keeping interest rates low, but the earnings season has cast doubt on whether the strategy is working. The unemployment rate was 7.8 percent as of September, slightly lower than previous months but still far above the rate that signals full employment. Chemical maker DuPont said it will have to cut jobs and other expenses after sales fell throughout the world. 3M, which makes all manner of products including Scotch tape and coatings for LCD screens, cut its profit predictions for the year. UPS, the world's largest package-delivery company, warned that the pace of global growth remains uneven, and that the holiday shopping season could prove disappointing. Xerox reported steep declines in sales of equipment and supplies and noted that the "challenging economy" was causing "cost pressures for large enterprises and governments." DuPont and Xerox were among the worst-performing stocks in the S&P 500. DuPont slid $4.59 to $45.17. Xerox was down 61 cents to $6.42. 3M slipped $2.96 to $89.57. The exception was UPS, which rose $1.88 to $73.44, after apparently convincing investors that it will be able to make money even in a weak economy. Piling on to the weak earnings news, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Va., reported that manufacturing in the central Atlantic region "pulled back" in October, and said that manufacturers had grown less optimistic. The price of crude oil fell, another sign that investors expect a weak economy. The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note sank to 1.77 percent from 1.82 percent Monday as nervous investors sold stocks and shifted money into low-risk U.S. government bonds. Of the 123 companies in the S&P 500 that had reported earnings as of Monday, only 38 percent beat expectations on revenue, according to John Butters, senior earnings analyst at FactSet. That's far below the average of 56 percent over the past four years and the lowest proportion since the first quarter of 2009, when the stock market hit its lowest point of the Great Recession.