Wall Street: tech's heaviness takes its toll
The day's decline remained "technical" after the +1.8% gained the previous day: the Dow Jones shed 0.16% (despite the -6% plunge of UnitedHealth, the index's second-largest weighting behind Apple), the S&P500 gave up 0.21%, and the Nasdaq fell 0.89% in the wake of Apple, but also Tesla -3.4%, Nvidia -2%, Alphabet and Amazon -1.2%, Meta -1%.
On the statistics front, it was a very busy day in the US, which resulted in a slight easing on the bond market (the '10 yr' erased -4 basis points to 4.614%): US retail sales rose by 0.4% in December, half as much as November's +0.8%.
On the employment front, the Labor Department recorded 217,000 new jobless claims in the US in the week to January 6, up 14,000 on the previous week.
But activity in the manufacturing sector is recovering vigorously in the Philadelphia region, according to the index calculated by the local Fed, which rose from a revised reading of -10.9 in December to +44.3 in January, its highest level since April 2021.
On the inflation front, import prices rose by 0.1% in December for the third consecutive month, a figure which shows that inflationary pressures now appear to be under better control... but beware, the devil is in the detail.
Indeed, the rise in food and beverage prices accelerated in December, to 2.8% from 1.4% in November. Over a sliding 12-month period, import prices rose by 2.2%, their highest increase for two years.
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