After another day of tumultuous trading on Wall Street, technology firms led equities lower Thursday, as global markets continue to fluctuate due to concern about the route of inflation, interest rates, and the global economy.
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The S&P 500 declined 0.4%, the fifth loss in the previous six days. The drop is yet another setback for US equities, which had recently risen to their highest level since June 2020 after a drop in oil prices appeared to relieve some of the pressure on the world’s rising inflation.
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Oil prices had their own swings Thursday, with a barrel of U.S. crude jumping as much as 5.7%, before flip-flopping between gains and losses. It settled at $106.02, down 2.5%. Recent surges in energy prices have raised the risk that the economy is set to struggle under a toxic cocktail of stagnating growth and persistently high inflation.
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The S&P 500 dropped 18.36 points to 4,259.52. The benchmark index is now 11.2% below the all-time high it set early this year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 112.18 points, or 0.3%, to 33,174.07, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite slid 125.58 points, or 0.9%, to 13,129.96.
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Smaller company stocks held up better than the broader market. The Russell 2000 fell 4.62 points, or 0.2%, to 2,011.67.
European stocks were hit even harder, with Germany’s DAX losing 2.9% and France’s CAC 40 down 2.8%. Asian stocks mostly rose.
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Brent crude, the international standard, fell 1.6% to $109.33 per barrel. Both it and U.S. benchmark oil are up more than 40% for 2022 so far, though they remain below the peaks they hit earlier this week. U.S. oil briefly topped $130.
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The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which tracks expectations for inflation and economic growth, wavered immediately after the inflation report’s release. It rose to 2% from 1.94% late Wednesday. The two-year Treasury yield, which moves more on expectations of what the Federal Reserve will do with short-term rates, rose to 1.71% from 1.68%.
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On Wall Street, the losses were widespread. Big tech companies were some of the heaviest weights on the market. Chip and software companies slumped sharply. Micron Technology fell 4.7% and Advanced Micro Devices slid 4.1%. On the winning side was Amazon, which climbed 5.4% after it announced a 20-for-1 stock split and approved a program to buy back up to $10 billion of its stock.