Wall Street Limps Through a Blackout Monday
NEW YORK -- A power blackout in lower Manhattan forced an early-afternoon closing of New York's two biggest commodity exchanges and the American Stock Exchange, disrupting trading in some financial markets.</br></br>Futures trading was halted in oil and gold, two of the world's most important commodities whose prices have jumped in reaction to turmoil in the Middle East. The blackout also affected a wide range of financial instruments, from stock options and currencies to the Federal Reserve's weekly auction of Treasury bills. Trading in bond markets was especially hard hit.</br></br>It was an eerie scene. Hundreds of traders stood in darkened commodity trading pits in the World Trade Center, below clocks that stood frozen at 1:13. Now-useless trading cards littered the floor.</br></br>The New York Mercantile Exchange, which trades the world's benchmark oil futures contract, and the Commodity Exchange, which trades the major gold contract, both shut down trading. Three smaller commodity exchanges and the nearby American Stock Exchange, a major stock-options market, joined them.</br></br>But several blocks away on Broad Street, the New York Stock Exchange, the nation's biggest stock market, remained open and finished up in a final-hour rally.