Falling oil prices have been a real boon to anyone who drives a car, but they are starting to play havoc with the stock markets. The S&P 500 index energy sector dropped 3.1 percent yesterday, spearheading the overall index's largest one-day drop in almost two months.
The price of a barrel of Brent crude oil reached a new five-year low yesterday, and there's room for it to fall even further. OPEC issued a forecast yesterday saying that global demand for the cartel's crude oil could fall in 2015 to its lowest level in more than a decade.
All that bad news has put the S&P energy sector down 14.7 percent for 2014, the worst performing of the 10 major S&P sectors. But the recent performance is even worse than that: The sector is down 25 percent from its peak on June 23, nearly six months ago.
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