Dow Drops Over 400 Amid Economic Worries

Stocks continued to slide Thursday as weak outlooks from Cisco and Toyota, dismal October retail sales and the prospect of a very grim payrolls number tomorrow rattled the market.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average wandered around at the open, then spiraled into a triple-digit decline and was down more than 400 in afternoon trading. The Standard & Poor's 500 index and Nasdaqalso declined, with the S&P being the hardest hit of the three.

The CBOE volatility index, which has been steadily ticking higher since bottoming at 44.25 on election day, soared past 60. Still, it's a far cry from the fear gauge's peak of 89.53 in October.

This is the market's second straight day of decline. All three indexes shed more than 5 percent onWednesday as anxiety over the economy returned after a brief sigh of relief following the historic presidential election in which Barack Obama became the first African-American to be elected president.

The morning's gloom overshadowed any comfort traders may have taken from some pretty hefty rate cuts across the pond. The Bank of England slashed its key lending rate 1.5 percentage pointsto 3 percent and the European Central Bank cut a key rate by half a percentage point.

In the U.S., the number of workers filing first-time claims for unemployment insurance fell by 4,000to 481,000 last week, in-line with expectations. The prior week, however, was revised to 485,000 from 479,000. The four-week moving average, which smooths out weekly fluctuations, was unchanged at 477,000.

U.S. business productivity slowed sharply in the third quarter,