Most of the U.S. stock market fell Wednesday as Wall Street contended with the downside of a U.S. economy that keeps powering through its many challenges.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 slipped 0.3% to close out its third losing month in the last four. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 443 points, or 0.9%, and the Nasdaq composite added 0.2%.
Stocks turned lower after data reports suggested the U.S. economy was even stronger during the spring than earlier thought. That helped yields remain high in the bond market, which in turn kept up the pressure weighing on stocks and all financial markets.
The day began with gains for stocks following an encouraging report that said inflation wasn’t as bad across the United States last month as economists expected. It said the cost of living for U.S. consumers was 3.4% higher overall in August than a year earlier. That was not as high as the 3.7% inflation rate that economists expected, even if it remained worse than the Fed’s 2% target.
The report followed others from earlier in the month about inflation during August, but it’s the one that the Federal Reserve prefers to use.
Shorter-term Treasury yields fell as traders pared bets that the Fed will raise its main interest rate next month to get inflation further under control. They now see just a 37% chance of that, down from the coin flip’s chance seen a day earlier, according to data from CME Group.
That helped the yield on the two-year Treasury briefly fall toward 4.83% before it pulled back to 4.89%, where it was late Tuesday.
But longer-term yields rose in the bond market. That’s in part because worries about high inflation are just one of the reasons longer-term yields have jumped in the United States and around the world.
The seemingly solid U.S. economy is another. Besides Wednesday’s better-than-expected report on the overall U.S. economy, another update said growth in business activity in the Midwest was also stronger than economists expected.
Much of the strength in the U.S. economy is due to consumers, who are increasing their spending by more than their incomes are rising.
“The consumer remains resilient, in a much better position than previously thought,” according to Gary Schlossberg, global strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
Other factors sending Treasury yields higher are also continuing to churn, including worries about the big debt loads that Washington and other governments worldwide are supporting.
Oil prices, meanwhile, rose in their latest swings amid uncertainty about when the war with Iran will allow the flow of crude to be fully restored. Brent crude, the international standard, climbed 1.9% to settle at $98.03 per barrel.
It all helped the yield on the 10-year Treasury, which is the centerpiece of the bond market, drop as low as 5.20% in the morning before rising to 5.29%. That’s up from 5.26% late Tuesday, and it’s back to where it was more than two decades ago in 2002.
The 30-year Treasury yield, which takes into account expectations for inflation and economic growth many years down the line, climbed to 5.64% from 5.59% late Tuesday.
Higher yields slow the overall economy by making borrowing money more expensive for everyone, while undercutting prices for all kinds of investments.
On Wall Street, Cal-Maine Foods dropped 0.7% after the country’s largest egg company reported a larger loss for the latest quarter than analysts expected. With plenty of eggs available in the market, Cal-Maine Foods saw a sharp drop in prices it could charge, compared with a year earlier.
Helping to limit the market’s losses was Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which rose 3.9%. It increased its forecast for revenue from its networking business, which is benefiting from the boom in artificial-intelligence technology.
MongoDB climbed 3.4% after the database company’s board boosted its program to send cash to shareholders by $1 billion through buybacks of its own stock. That helped MongoDB recover some of its sharp loss from earlier in the week, after it said Chirantan “CJ” Desai was stepping down as CEO for a senior role at Meta Platforms.
All told, the S&P 500 fell 19.30 points to 7,651.54. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 443.87 to 50,906.05, and the Nasdaq composite added 63.52 to 26,861.06.
In stock markets abroad, indexes dipped in Europe following a mixed finish in Asia. Japan’s Nikkei 225 jumped 1.9%, while France’s CAC 40 fell 0.9% for two of the world’s bigger moves.
Choe writes for the Associated Press.
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