WALL STREET DOWN, WEAKED BY TENSIONS IN TAIWAN
couple Noel Randewich and Devik Jain
(Archyde.com) – The New York Stock Exchange ended lower on Tuesday following a choppy session as geopolitical tensions escalated with the visit to Taiwan by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, who plunged relations between the United States and China to an unprecedented low.
The Dow Jones index fell 1.23% to 32,396.30 points.
The broader S&P-500 lost 0.66% to 4,091.32 points.
The Nasdaq Composite fell 0.16% to 12,348.76 points.
Upon arriving in Taipei earlier in the day, Nancy Pelosi described her visit as a demonstration of US support for Taiwan. China, which considers the island a renegade province, has denounced a threat to stability and peace.
The giants Microsoft and Visa, down 1.1% and 2.4% respectively, weighed on the S&P-500, all major sectors of which ended in the red, first and foremost real estate, down 1.3%.
Semiconductor makers, heavily exposed to the Chinese market, ended in disarray. Advanced Micro Devices rebounded 2.6% ahead of the post-closing release of its quarterly results.
Caterpillar fell 5.8% following saying it expects a bigger-than-expected decline in demand for its excavators in China, the scene of a real estate crisis, a problem that adds to bottlenecks in supply chains. supply.
The heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing come once morest an already heavy backdrop for financial markets, with the war in Ukraine entering its sixth month, soaring inflation and tightening monetary conditions.
Data released today by the US Department of Labor show that the number of job creations in the United States fell in June at its fastest pace in two years, as demand for labor declined among retailers.
As the Federal Reserve (Fed) decided in July to raise interest rates by 75 basis points, investors are trying to determine whether the US central bank has carried out most of the tightening of its monetary policy, following previous hikes earlier this year.
Overall better than expected, the results season has supported the main Wall Street indices recently.
Stocks of U.S. defense companies, including Raytheon Technologies Corp and Lockheed Martin, rose between 0.5% and 2.3% as the United States is Taiwan’s main arms supplier. Uber Technologies reported jumped almost 19% following the publication of a positive cash flow in the second quarter, unheard of in the group’s history. Pinterest soared by more than 11% in the wake of the announcement that the activist investor Elliott Investment Management became the main shareholder of the platform.
(French version Jean Terzian)
