As turmoil swept through global financial markets on Monday, fueled by concerns that the economy is headed for a hard landing, investors began to speculate that the Federal Reserve could jump in to cushion the fallout with an emergency interest rate cut.

The Fed only considers emergency cuts — ones that occur outside of its regularly scheduled meetings — in extreme situations. The most recent one happened on March 15, 2020, when central bankers slashed borrowing costs to near-zero as the onset of the coronavirus pandemic sent panic coursing across global markets.

Monday’s sell-off was less drastic than that moment. Investors are dumping stocks because they have become nervous that the economy might fall into a recession after a few weak economic data releases in the United States, including a jobs report released last Friday that showed unemployment rising. Joblessness rarely rises sharply outside of an economic downturn.

The data fueled serious concerns that Fed officials have fallen behind on adjusting their policy stance. Central bankers have held interest rates at 5.3 percent for a full year, a relatively high setting that is making it expensive to borrow to buy a home or expand a business. The risk is that Fed policymakers might have choked off demand too much for too long, causing a slowdown in the labor market that will begin to snowball into wider economic pain.

As stock indexes slumped around the world, investors began to bet heavily that the Fed would cut interest rates sharply in the coming months. While a rate cut at the Fed’s September meeting was widely expected even before the employment report last week, traders now see a large reduction of half a percentage point or more — bigger than the quarter-point moves that the Fed tends to announce during normal times.

Some outside commentators called for rapid and drastic reductions, starting imminently. But Joseph A. LaVorgna, chief economist at SMBC Nikko Securities, argued in a note that an inter-meeting cut “would look like a panic move.”