U.S. stocks tumbled on Thursday with all the three major indexes posting their worst quarter since the pandemic crash in 2020.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average decreased 550.46 points, or 1.56 percent, to 34,678.35. The S&P 500 fell 72.04 points, or 1.57 percent, to 4,530.41. The Nasdaq Composite Index was down 221.75 points, or 1.54 percent, to 14,220.52.

In March, the Dow rose 2.3 percent, the S&P 500 climbed 3.6 percent and the Nasdaq Composite advanced 3.4 percent.

However, for the first quarter of this year, the Dow and the S&P 500 dropped 4.6 percent and 4.9 percent, respectively, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq shed 9.1 percent. All three major averages saw their largest quarterly decline since the first quarter of 2020, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Investors parsed a slew of newly-released economic data.

U.S. personal consumption expenditures (PCE), the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation measure, surged 6.4 percent in February over the past year, the Commerce Department reported on Thursday.

The core PCE, which excludes the volatile food and energy prices, jumped 0.4 percent in February, up 5.4 percent from the same period last year, marking the biggest jump in nearly four decades, the report showed. The index is well above the Federal Reserve's 2 percent target on inflation.

Elsewhere, the U.S. Labor Department said the nation's initial jobless claims, a rough way to measure layoffs, rose by 14,000 to 202,000 in the week ending March 26. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had estimated new claims would rise to 195,000.

U.S.-listed Chinese companies traded lower on Thursday with all the top 10 stocks by weight in the S&P U.S. Listed China 50 index ending the day on a downbeat note. 

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