(CercleFinance.com) – Red dominates on Wall Street, except for the Dow Jones which grabbed 0.17% at 34,500 ‘all round’ (thanks to Intel which took +3.3% and the 3 pharmaceutical giants – the more defensive of the ‘Dow’ – up +1.4% on average).
The S&P500 sinks into the red (-0.32%) and the Nasdaq yields -0.9%, which is rather reassuring after an initial drop of -1.5% and a test of 13,700Pts at the low of the day.
Wall Street limits the damage but it would be premature to rejoice: the nervousness of investors pushed the ‘VIX’ to around 16, before a saving – and somewhat unexpected – relaxation brought the index back to equilibrium around 15, 35 (despite the decline of the ‘S&P’).
While Apple’s initial drop was close to -5%, cheap buyers came forward after an hour of trading, reducing the loss to -2.9% (this was the most active stock of the day with 90 million shares traded against an average of 54 million since June, i.e. $15.7 billion in turnover on this stock alone, or 6.5 times the volume traded on the 40 CAC stocks in Paris).
Apple took its suppliers in its wake: Qualcomm weighed in with all its weight with -7.2%, as well as Western Digital with -4.2%, Applied Materials with -3.2%.
The ‘Apple’ ecosystem remained under pressure for a second consecutive session for the same reason: Beijing is beginning to restrict or ban the use of foreign brand smartphones by Chinese officials in the workplace.
Everyone has understood that this penalizes Apple above all, all the more so 10 days from the presentation of the i-Phone ’15’ and a few weeks from its marketing (China represented 20% of sales of the latest model each year).
Investors have another reason for gloom with the publication of a flurry of statistics that do not rule out the hypothesis of a final tightening of the FED in early November.
The robustness of the labor market continues to surprise: the number of registrations for unemployment benefits in the United States fell again by -13,000 during the week of August 28, to 216,000 according to the Department of Labor (lowest total in 7 months ).
The four-week moving average – considered a better indicator of the underlying trend in the job market – reveals a clear decline of 8,500 in the number of registrations compared to the previous week, to be established at 229,250.
Nothing encouraging on the non-agricultural productivity side: it only increased by 3.5% in the second quarter of 2023 at an annualized rate, according to the Department of Labor, which had announced it to be up by 3.7% in a preliminary estimate. a month ago.
These productivity gains compared to the previous quarter are based on both a 1.9% increase in production and a 1.5% reduction in the number of hours worked, their first reduction since the second quarter of 2020.
Given a 5.7% increase in hourly wages (2 pts higher than inflation), non-agricultural unit labor costs in the United States increased by 2.2% in the second quarter of 2023, despite this increase in productivity.
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