U.S. stocks fell off a cliff at the open Friday, bounced higher, but saw the rally lose steam by late-morning.

Panic selling, however, continued in foreign markets as the UK’s FTSE 100 plunged 8.1 percent to 3,963 and Japan’s Nikkei 225 plummeted 9.6 percent to 8,276.

Technology stocks gave back some early gains as the Morgan Stanley High-Technology Index lost 2.4 percent to 360.

Google dropped 1.4 percent to $323.25, Microsoft tumbled 4.4 percent to $21.32 and Intel skidded 4.3 percent to $14.93.

Bucking the trend were wireless equipment provider LM Ericsson, which climbed 3.6 percent to $6.39 and Apple, which rose 1.8 percent to $90.35. Apple is scheduled to roll out a new line of Macbook notebook computers.

President Bush, in a Rose Garden address, acknowledged that Washington’s efforts won’t immediately calm the markets, but he said the government is “aggressively” using the “wide range of tools at our disposal.”

He chronicled the government’s efforts, including the Federal Reserve’s cut in interest rates and injection of hundreds of billions of dollars in liquidity, but acknowledged that investors must regain confidence.

“Anxiety can feed anxiety,” he said.

In late-morning trading the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 4.7 percent to 8,1778, while the Nasdaq lost 4 percent to 1,579. The Standard & Poor’s 500 slid 5.6 percent to 859.

In Europe, panic selling in financial issues sent averages down sharply as Royal Bank of Scotland lost 19.4 percent and Barclays dropped 15.7 percent. Also losing ground was wireless provider Vodafone, which tumbled 9.5 percent.

The Dow Jones Stoxx 600, a broad index of companies throughout Europe, fell 6.7 percent to 206.95. The UK’s FTSE 100 dropped 7.7 percent to 3,984, Germany’s DAX 30 shed 6.7 percent to 4,556 and the CAC 40 slid 7.3 percent to 3,191.

In Asia, major industrial companies like Mitsubishi and Toshiba led Japan’s Nikkei to a whopping 881 point, or 9.6 percent loss. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng and Singapore’s Straits Times indices also took precipitous falls, losing 7.2 percent to 14,797 and 7.3 percent to 1,948 respectively.