WASHINGTON - Stock markets in Asia and Europe soared Tuesday, with U.S. stocks following suit in a reversal of sharp losses Monday.

The Nikkei index in Tokyo advanced by more than 7%, while other Asian markets increased by smaller amounts.

Major European indexes surged by more about 8.4%.

Key markets in New York opened the trading day by advancing about 6% but gained more ground by mid-afternoon. Floor trading on the New York Stock Exchange has been banned during the coronavirus pandemic, with all trades now being handled electronically.

Stocks across the globe have been battered as one national government after another has struggled to contain the scourge of the deadly coronavirus.

In the U.S., President Donald Trump during his White House tenure has bragged on Twitter about the ever-increasing stock values and the corresponding gains in the stock-linked savings accounts of American workers.

The gains during the more than three years of the Trump presidency reached a peak about four weeks ago, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 30 blue-chip U.S. stocks closing at a high of 29,348.

At Monday's close of 18,592, the Dow has fallen by more than 36%, erasing all the gains in the market since Trump took office in early 2017.

But Trump remains optimistic about a recovery.

"The hardship will end, it will end soon, normal life will return and our economy will rebound very, very strongly," Trump said Monday at the White House.

"America will ... soon be open for business," he said. "Very soon, a lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting, a lot sooner."

"We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself, we're not going to let the cure be worse than the problem," Trump said. "At the end of the 15-day period [in a week], we'll make a decision as to which way we want to go, where we want to go, the timing, and essentially we're referring to the timing of the opening. Essentially the opening of our country."

Some economists are predicting the U.S., with the world's biggest economy, will fall into a recession in the April-to-June period, if not sooner in the first three months of the year.

Early reports suggest more than 2 million U.S. workers made claims for unemployment compensation last week after 281,000 the week before, which itself was an eight-fold increase from two weeks ago.