Tel Aviv Exchange Halts trade After 6% Fall

Trading on Israel's Tel Aviv stock exchange was temporarily halted on Sunday after share prices fell six percent at the open on news of a U.S. credit rating downgrade, public radio reported.

Trading opened as normal on Sunday, the first day of Israel's working week, but mandatory suspensions went into effect minutes into the session as the stock exchange plunged.

Both the blue-chip TA-25 and the TA-100 indices dropped more than five percent in pre-trading, prompting the exchange to put into effect a practice known as an "English opening," with trading delayed for short periods.

"What happened this morning is that during pre-trading, the TA-25 went down more than five percent, so there are a few actions that are taken," exchange spokeswoman Idit Yaaron told Agence France Presse.

"The first is an English opening, where the trading is delayed by three to five minutes, after that, the trading system checks the data again, if it's still up or down by five percent, it's delayed another three to five minutes."

After the first two short suspensions, the indices had failed to stabilise sufficiently, prompting the exchange to authorise a 45-minute suspension, Yaaron said.

The delay allowed trading to return within the five-percent band, and trading resumed shortly afterwards, but both indices quickly began to fall again.

At 11:36 am (0836 GMT), the benchmark TA-25 index was down 6.07 percent at 1,084.84, while the TA-100 had slipped 6.49 percent to be at 9,80.19.

Once ordinary trading gets underway, day trading is not halted unless the exchange drops or rises 12 percent, Yaaron said.

The session on Sunday was the first on the Israeli bourse since the international agency Standard & Poor's said it was downgrading the United States' credit rating to AA+ from the top notch triple-A.

The announcement panicked international markets and was criticized by Washington as unjustified.

But S&P argued U.S. leaders were becoming less able to get to grips with the country's huge fiscal deficit and debt load.

The credit rating agency also gave a negative outlook for the U.S., saying there was a chance its rating could be cut again within two years if progress is not made to reduce the government budget gap.

In Israel, the stock market plunge also came a day after massive nationwide protests over the high cost of living and income disparity in the Jewish state.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged reforms to ease living costs, but has warned the broad reforms favoured by protesters could throw Israeli into a financial crisis.