Wall Street has its worst day since the 2008 financial crisis

Stocks tanked in the first day of trading since the United States lost its AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor’s.

All three major U.S. stock indexes sank between 5 percent and 7 percent, making it Wall Street’s worst day since the 2008 financial crisis, CNN reports.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 635 points, or 5.6 percent, to 10,810. That’s its sixth biggest one-day drop on record, and it left the Dow below 11,000 for the first time since last November. The S&P 500 dropped 80 points, or 6.7 percent, to 1,120. The Nasdaq Composite declined 175 points, or 6.9 percent, to 2,358.

(More from GlobalPost: Dow plunges as much as 600 points)

All stocks in the S&P 500 Index traded lower for the first time since at least 1996, Bloomberg reports. Financial stocks fell particularly far, with Bank of America Corp. plunging the most of any stock on the index – 20 percent. Citigroup and Morgan Stanley were down about 15 percent.

Investors lost about $1 trillion on the Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index, the broadest index of U.S. stocks, which dropped 891.93 points, or just over 7 percent, CNN reports.

While European and Asian markets didn’t plummet as dramatically as the American markets, they still posted significant losses. Britain's FTSE 100 dropped 2.7 percent, Germany’s DAX sank 4.7 percent and France's CAC 40 dropped 4.2 percent.

The Shanghai Composite retreated 3.8 percent, the Hang Seng in Hong Kong and Japan's Nikkei each fell 2.2 percent.

“What's rocking the market is a growth scare,” Kathleen Gaffney, co-manager of the $20 billion Loomis Sayles Bond Fund, told the Associated Press. Investors are afraid that the economies of Europe and the United States won't grow quickly enough to work their way out from under high debt burdens, she explained.