Dow down in first week's trading, economic data not encouraging

With one full week of trading in 2008 done, the US stock market clearly hasn't made a good start to the year. MarketWatch reports:

U.S. stocks plunged Tuesday, led by a 17% drop in shares of Countrywide Financial Corp. amid swirling bankruptcy speculation, leading the Dow industrials to have their worst first five trading days of the year ever...

Up more than 100 points during the session, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended 238.4 points lower to 12,589.1, with 25 of its 30 components declining...

Following Tuesday's performance, the Dow has now lost 675 points since the start of the year, marking its worst performance ever for the first five trading days of the year. Percentage wise, the Dow has lost 5.1%, its worst drop since 1978, when the blue-chip index lost 5.6%...

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude-oil futures ended up $1.24 at $96.33 a barrel.

Elsewhere on the Nymex, gold futures surged to a new all-time high, with the contract for February delivery hitting $884 an ounce in electronic trade.

Yesterday's US economic data didn't look too encouraging. From Bloomberg:

The National Association of Realtors' index of pending home sales decreased 2.6 percent to 87.6, following a 3.7 percent gain in October that was larger than previously estimated, the group said today in Washington...

Consumer credit increased $15.4 billion for the month to $2.51 trillion, after rising $2 billion in October, the Fed said.

And things are not looking much better in the UK:

U.K. retail sales rose at the slowest pace since March 2006 and house prices declined for the first quarter in seven years, adding to the case for the Bank of England to cut interest rates again.

Revenue at stores open at least 12 months increased 0.3 percent from a year earlier in December, the British Retail Consortium said in London today. Home values fell 0.8 percent in the fourth quarter, the first drop since 2000, according the HBOS Plc, the country's biggest mortgage lender...

Gross mortgage lending fell 10 percent in November from the previous month to 30 billion pounds ($59 billion), the Council of Mortgage Lenders said in a report today. On the year, lending was down 9.6 percent.

Nor in the euro area:

Retail sales declined 1.4 percent in November from a year earlier, the biggest drop since at least 1997, the European Union's statistics office in Luxembourg said today. From the previous month, sales fell 0.5 percent, the third decline in four months. Economists had forecast a 0.5 percent increase, based on the median of 13 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey.

But on the bright side, German manufacturing orders did rise 3.4 percent in November.