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Wall Street just chalked up its worst day of 2019

There wasn’t much to smile about after Monday’s massive sell-off on Wall Street — the worst drop of 2019 — as investors become increasingly alarmed about fraying US-China trade relations. Bright spots were hard to find in the day-long scrum. Gold prices, a fear barometer, jumped. The Japanese yen and Swiss franc, long safe harbors, advanced. ‘‘They are viewed as safe havens when the world falls to pieces because these countries are politically stable,’’ said Joachim Fels, chief economic adviser at Pimco. Utilities, another go-to sector in times of stress, edged into positive territory before succumbing and turning negative late in the day. Investors also flocked to the safety of the 10-year US Treasury bond, evidence of a loss of faith in stocks altogether. The losers were everywhere. Most stocks. Technology. Retail. Oil prices, down. Natural gas, down. Dow transports — a closely watched marker for the economy — fell. Even the Russell 2000 index of small-cap stocks ($2.5 billion and below) was off. The volatility index, VIX, soared 30 percent. Stodgy value stocks like Verizon, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, and Johnson & Johnson were hurting, but not as much as such tech stalwarts as Apple, Visa, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google-parent Alphabet. Technology companies, as a whole, accounted for a major share of the day’s losses.