ap photo A Trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Thursday. Stocks are opening higher on Wall Street Thursday in a broad rally led by the IT and communications sectors.

Wall Street capped a quiet day of trading with more losses Friday, as it closed the book on the worst year for the S&P 500 since 2008.

The benchmark index finished with a loss of 19.4 percent for 2022, or 18.1 percent, including dividends. It’s just its third annual decline since the financial crisis 14 years ago and a painful reversal for investors after the S&P 500 notched a gain of nearly 27 percent in 2021. All told, the index lost $8.2 trillion in value, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

The Nasdaq composite, with a heavy component of technology stocks, racked up an even bigger loss of 33.1 percent.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, meanwhile, posted an 8.8 percent loss for 2022.

Stocks struggled all year as inflation put increasing pressure on consumers and raised concerns about economies slipping into recession. Central banks raised interest rates to fight high prices. The Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate hikes remain a major focus for investors as the central bank walks a thin line between raising rates enough to cool inflation, but not so much that they stall the U.S. economy into a recession.

The Fed’s key lending rate stood at a range of 0 percent to 0.25 percent at the beginning of 2022 and will close the year at a range of 4.25 percent to 4.5 percent after seven increases. The U.S. central bank forecasts that will reach a range of 5 percent to 5.25 percent by the end of 2023. Its forecast doesn’t call for a rate cut before 2024.

Rising interest rates prompted investors to sell the high-priced shares of technology giants such as Apple and Microsoft as well as other companies that flourished as the economy recovered from the pandemic. Amazon and Netflix lost roughly 50 percent of their market value. Tesla and Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, each dropped more than 60 percent, their biggest-ever annual declines.