OREANDA-NEWS. Key to Japan's Nikkei index of Tokyo's largest Asian stock exchange on Friday crashed to its lowest level since September last year amid investor concern over the spread of the new coronavirus. At one point in the auction, this indicator fell by 4 pp to a level below 21 thousand points.

Nikkei, which reflects the stock prices of 225 leading Japanese corporations, is going down after the sharp drop in performance on all the major stock exchanges in North America and the European Union, noted the day before. On Friday, the indices of the main exchange floors of East Asia also go down. Nikkei, in particular, has been falling for the fifth consecutive working day.

"At the stock exchange", Kyodo news agency quoted analyst Maki Savada, an analyst at Nomura Securities, a large investment bank, as saying, "a chain reaction of a feverish sale of shares has arisen". The spread of coronavirus, she noted, reinforces concern over the safety of global production chains and a possible drop in consumer demand in leading countries.