New York ? U.S. stocks plunged on Friday, diving toward declines for both the week and the month of February after massive losses by American International Group Inc. shook Wall Street and poor results from Dell Inc. rocked the tech sector.

“We had a trainload of bad news; they couldn’t keep the bad news coming fast enough, yet we’re going to end the week pretty much where we started,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Jefferies & Co.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 300.32 points to 12,281.53, positioning the blue chips for a weekly loss of about 100 points, or 0.8 percent. The Dow fell 2.9 percent in February, and is down 7.4 percent for the year.

All of the Dow’s 30 components spent the final day of the week in the red, with the blue-chip bleeding fronted by American International Group, off more than 7 percent in the aftermath of the insurance giant reporting the largest loss in its almost 90 years in business.

The S&P 500 dropped 36.44 points to 1,331.24, down 1.6 percent for the week, 3.4 percent for the month and 9.3 percent year-to-date.

The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite declined 61.69 points to 2,269.88, a drop of 1.5 percent on the week, a 5 percent decline for February and 14.4 percent so far this year.

The tech sector was among those retreating, with declines coming from bellwethers including Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp.; Dell Inc. fell 4.5 percent after the PC maker reported fourth-quarter profits fell 6 percent from a year ago.

Retail stocks also slipped amid gloomy news on consumer spending, with the S&P Retail Index off about 1 percent.