While the central bank’s moves to cut the rate of investment, spending and hiring “will reduce inflation, they will also bring some pain to households and businesses,” Powell said in his speech at the Jackson Hole symposium.
Wall Street was dyed red this Friday and its main indicator, the Industrial Dow Jones, fell 1.54%, following the president of the Federal Reserve (Fed), Jerome Powell, said that the US central bank it must continue to raise interest rates and keep them at a higher level until inflation is under control.
The Dow Jones was 511.24 to 32,780.54 points, while the selective S&P 500 lost 1.90% or 79.94 points to 4,119.18 points.
For its part, the Nasdaq market composite index, which brings together the main technology companies, fell 2.44% or 308.99 integers, to 12,330.27 units.
Investors had been waiting all week for Powell’s comments to find out how the central bank will achieve its objective of reducing inflation. while minimizing the risks of a strong recession.
Although the central bank’s measures to reduce the rate of investment, spending and hiring “will reduce inflation, they will also bring some pain to homes and businesses”Powell said in his speech at the symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
“Those are the unfortunate costs of reducing inflation. But failure to restore price stability would mean much greater pain,” he added.
Fed officials raised interest rates by 0.75 percentage point at each of their last two meetings, most recently in July, to a range between 2.25% and 2.5%.
At their meeting at the end of September, Fed expected to raise rates furtheralthough it is unknown if it will do so by 0.5 percentage points or by 0.75 points.
Tomorrow Isabel Schnabel, a member of the board of the European Central Bank, will speak at the annual meeting.
The red spread across all sectors and the drops in communications (-2.83%), technology (-2.47%) and non-essential goods (-2.36%) stood out.
Among the 30 listed companies of the Dow Jones, losses also predominated and the greatest decreases were for Nike (-3.05%) and Salesforce (-3.02%).
