The New York Stock Exchange fell on Thursday following stronger-than-expected job creation in the private sector in December in the United States, which might encourage the Fed to raise interest rates further.
The Dow Jones index dropped 0.99%, the technology-dominated Nasdaq 1.10%% and the S&P 500 fell 1.03% around 3:30 p.m. GMT.
During the last month of 2022, 235,000 jobs were created by private companies, according to the ADP/Stanford Lab monthly survey, well above the 148,000 to 153,000 expected by various economists.
The labor market therefore apparently remains very solid, which does not lead to a drop in inflation.
“This supports expectations that US central bank interest rates will stay higher for longer,” Schwab analysts summed up. Higher interest rates are not good for corporate accounts and therefore stock prices, analysts say.
The dollar reacted by climbing more than 1% once morest the pound and 0.57% once morest the euro. As for bond rates on ten-year bonds, they rose once more to 3.76% once morest 3.68% the day before at 2:50 p.m. GMT.
The statistics of the payroll processing firm ADP are however often to be taken with a grain of salt, underlined however Rubeela Farooqi, chief economist at HFE and “we invite to be careful regarding extrapolations”.
However, weekly jobless claims, also released on Thursday, also showed that “employers are not massively shedding their staff,” Oxford Economics said.
They fell at the end of December to their lowest level in three months, with 204,000 registrations over the week, according to the Department of Labor.
Official employment figures for December are due on Friday.
Another indicator that hasn’t helped improve investor sentiment, the US trade deficit has shrunk to its lowest level since September 2020. The drop in imports, while supportive of the nation’s accounts, may reflect a slowdown in the economy. activity and exchanges with China in particular.
While the job market as a whole is still strong, parts of the tech sector are clearly starting to falter.
The title of online distribution giant Amazon fell 1.13% to 84.18 dollars, its lowest level in four years.
The group of Jeff Bezos, which employs 1.5 million people worldwide and has hired with a vengeance since the pandemic, announced Wednesday evening “a little more than 18,000” job cuts, the largest workforce reduction never recorded by the company.
This job cut project is the largest and the latest in a series of restructurings affecting the tech sector, from Meta to Twitter.
The chain of pharmacies and drugstores Walgreens lost 6.67% following announcing better than expected quarterly results in terms of sales but weighed down by a huge provision of 3.7 billion dollars to finance an amicable agreement that will settle lawsuits related to the opioid crisis.
American pharmaceutical laboratories and distributors are accused of having, from 1996, aggressively promoted opioid painkillers available only on prescription.
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