Share Market Crash: Indian benchmark equity indices are witnessing a huge decline on Thursday. Today the Sensex fell more than 1,000 points and the Nifty fell below 24,000 points. This decline has come amid the US central bank Federal Reserve announcing a third consecutive cut in interest rates. In December, interest rates were cut by 25 basis points as expected. The Federal Reserve has taken this decision in the meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). After this cut, the interest rate has come down from 4.5%-4.75% to the target range of 4.25%-4.5%. Since July, the Fed has reduced rates by 1%. Interest rates came down to December 2022 levels.

Meanwhile, the market cap of all companies listed on BSE declined by Rs 5.94 lakh crore to Rs 446.66 lakh crore.

Apart from this, HDFC Bank, Infosys, ICICI Bank, Reliance Industries , SBI and HCL Tech witnessed the biggest decline. Banking stocks like Axis Bank, M&M, Kotak Bank and Bajaj Finance also contributed to this decline.

These IT stocks fell sharply

Domestic IT firms, which get a major chunk of their revenues from the US, opened up to 5% lower on concerns about rising US interest rates, led by LTI Mindtree, Mphasis and Wipro. Meanwhile, India VIX Sensex rose 5% to 14.37.

Rupee hits all-time low of 84.94 per dollar

The rupee on Wednesday fell by three paise to its all-time low of 84.94 (provisional) per dollar in the interbank foreign exchange market. Foreign exchange traders said that strong demand for the dollar from importers and foreign banks and sluggish trend in domestic markets affected investor sentiment. Due to this the rupee weakened against the dollar.

Global markets also declined

The impact of the US Fed's estimates of rate cuts in the year 2025 is visible on markets around the world. Most Asian markets have fallen today. S&P 500 and Nasdaq fell by about 3 percent. Dow Jones closed down by 2.58 percent. At the same time, a tremendous rise has been seen in the US dollar. After the decisions of the US Fed, the US dollar reached a 2-year high.