The sell-off in the worldwide financial services stocks with disastrous impact on the market, following the crises at Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch shook the Indian bourses too during the week resulting in the benchmark Sensex to fall down. 
 
Lots of stocks hit their lows because of the sharp fall. Around 250 companies hit their 52-week lows on the National Stock Exchange (NSE).

The week’s first half was under the tight grip of the bears backed by collapses of major banking institutions. But, the markets went back to the positive terrain on Friday, as regulators throughout the world stepped in to take some strict actions against short-sellers, thus bringing back some investor confidence into the stock markets. 

Sustained buying action by domestic institutional investors plus short covering assisted the Sensex to gain 788 points from its day’s low of 12,558 points on Friday. Finally, the Sensex marked its closure 14,042 after making a gain of 720 points.

After dropping continuously for three weeks, inflationary data climbed up marginally to 12.14% for the first week of September mainly because of costly food items such as fruits and vegetables.  

The 30 share index BSE Sensex gained 41.51 points to 14,042.32 during the week ended Sep. 19, 2008. 

In contrast, the broad based NSE Nifty rose 16.8 points to 4,245.25 during the same period.

BSE Mid-cap index declined 308.36 points to 5,228.78 during the week’s time, whereas the Small-cap index fell 495.55 points to 6,215.99 during the week. 

Major gainers amongst the sectoral indices include Oil & Gas, which profited 3.86%, Power surged 0.66%, PSU went up 0.80% and Capital Goods climbed 0.82%.

Major losers amongst the sectoral indices were Realty, which declined 12.59%, Metal dropped 7.79%, Conusmer Durables lost 7.39%, HC fell 5.87% and IT lost 3.68%.