- Well, another very volatileday on Wall Street today,

trading stopped for thefirst time in a decade.

The combination of crashing oil prices

and renewed fears overthe Corona virus outbreak

sent stocks plunging seven percent.

That drop in the S andP 500 and the DOW Jones

sliding 1800 points withinminutes of the opening bell

led to an automatic shut off,

halting all trading for a full 15 minutes.

The administration has calledon Wall Street executives

to meet with PresidentTrump at the White House

to discuss the response to the outbreak.

- And here now for more ontoday's stock market plunge

is Joel Griffith, research fellow

with the Heritage Foundation,

focusing on financial regulations.

Joel, thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me.

- So, what should most Americans make

of what we saw early this morning

with the stock market plunge?

- That it's important to not panic

and make the decisions thatwe make fully informed,

as informed as possible,

and to talk to our advisors,

and also realize that although this type

of a plunge overnight is rare,

we haven't had a drop like this in years.

This was on par with the 2008drop of around eight percent.

The markets, over time,have, up until now,

always recovered.

It might not be nextmonth or next quarter,

but we keep, if it'sfor retirement purposes,

we need to keep that longterm picture in mind.

- So, we saw or witnessed what's called

the so-called stockmarket circuit breaker,

can you explain what happened?

- So, overnight, traderscan go ahead and trade

what's called the futures,

and that gives an indicationof how far up and down

the market will open,

and that actually triggered a stop.

If the market moves on the down side

more than seven percent,

they actually have to pause in trading.

So when the market opened this morning,

it very quickly hit thatseven percent level,

and had to freeze until about 9:50,

and then there's another stop,if it goes down 13 percent,

it also has to stop.

If it goes down 20 percent, trading,

if it's not late in theday, it's done for the day.

So we've actually seen abit of rebound since then,

but that's really putin place to allow people

to think clearly, gettheir wits about them,

because we don't want to seethat panic spread needlessly.

- Amid the Corona virus fears,

we're also seeing oil prices plunging.

Are these two connected, Joel?

- So, they're somewhat interconnected,

but what we've seen oil pricesweakening, over this quarter,

and that's largely because

there has been a decrease in demand,

and a lot of that decrease in demand

has been because the Corona virus

has caused economic output andactivity to decline in China.

But what we saw this weekend,

that has not happened since 1991,

we saw oil prices plunge about 30 percent.

But that was unrelated,that was a situation

where OPEG was trying towork together with Russia

to try to suppress production,

and Russia, at the end of the day,

said, we're not goingto participate in this.

And so now, Saudi Arabia has promised

to just have a gusher ofsupply hit the market,

a huge increase

of several million barrelsper day next month.

- You had mentioned theearlier stock market reaction

that was similar to theone that we saw today.

How has this marketreaction been different

than previous outbreaks?

- So, if you go back 35 years,

we've seen 11 epidemics thathave occurred across the globe.

I think it's real interesting to look at

what's happened six months later.

Even one of thoseinstances our stock market

has actually been higher thanthe day prior to the outbreak.

This one is a bit different,

but in terms of the virus,

but also, we're in a social media age.

And we see information,whether accurate or not,

spread a lot more rapidly,

and so I think having thatinformation can be a positive,

because we're able to bealert to what is going on.

But in some cases itactually enhances the fear,

and not always is that fear warranted,

and I think that ispart of what we've seen

in the last few weeks withthe volatility in the market

and now, being down 20 percentover the last few weeks.

- All right, Joel Griffith

with the Heritage Foundation, thank you.

- Thanks for having me.