Yikes. It wasn’t the bad weather up and down the East Coast today that made investors shiver.

The folks on Wall Street did a find job of doing that on their own.

And not just for airline stocks.

When all the shouting was over, the Dow Jones Industrials ended the day down 299.64 points, or 4.2%. This brought the Dow down to 6763.29. This was the first time the Dow has closed below 7000 since May 1, 1997.

Meanwhile, the S&P 500 fell 4.7% or 34.27 points, while the Nasdaq lost 4% or 54.99 points, closing at 1322.85.

The big news pushing stocks lower today concerned insurance giant AIG. The federal government announced that it was increasing its stake in the company by some $30 billion. The total for both U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve investments in the cratering financial giant is now about $163 billion.

The market was in no mood to hear this today, and stocks took the brunt of investors angst as a result.

In the airline sector, the carnage was deep, and it ran pretty much across the board.

Of all the stocks we track at PlaneBusiness, none, not one, was up for the day.

The biggest losers for the day included: AirTran, which lost 15%, closing at 2.54; Hawaiian Airlines, which also dropped back 15% to close at 2.68; US Airways which lost 13%, closing at 2.47; JetBlue, which was down 14% to close at 3.29; Pinnacle, which lost a whopping 20%, closing at 1.12; ExpressJet, which was down 10%, closing at 1.22; and United Airlines, which lost 13% to close at 4.26.

Whew.

That’s all I can say.

Oh, and Southwest shares, which are plumbing unbefore seen depths of late, closed at 5.52, down 6% for the day.