PARIS (Reuters) – The first exchanges on Wednesday on Wall Street are tinged with caution, the imminence of monetary policy announcements from the Federal Reserve keeping American investors in suspense.
The Dow Jones index lost 158.04 points, or 0.46%, to 34,054.08 points, penalized by the decline in UnitedHealth. The Standard & Poor’s 500 dropped 0.03% to 4,367.67 points and the Nasdaq Composite 0.14%, or 18.62 points, to 13,554.7.
The Fed’s announcements will come as the close approaches, with the publication at 6:00 p.m. GMT of the press release, which will be followed 30 minutes later by the traditional press conference by the president of the American central bank.
A status quo is widely expected for this month, after the good figures for consumer and producer prices. On the other hand, investors are much more undecided on the Fed’s next actions in July. The tone of the press release and that of Jerome Powell’s declarations will hold particular attention.
“I think we’ll have what’s called a ‘hawkish break’ on Wednesday, with status quo but cautious inflation commentary,” said Brad Bernstein, managing director of UBS Wealth Management. “We don’t know yet whether or not this is the end of rate hikes for this cycle and the Fed doesn’t know either.” On the stock market, United Health, the bottom of the Dow Jones, lost 8.30%, the health insurer having said it expected higher medical costs in the second quarter. In its wake, Cigna, CVS Health and Humana drop from 3.39% to 13.17%.
In the green, the Advanced Micro Devices group gained 0.90% in response to information from Reuters that its artificial intelligence chips could be of interest to Amazon Web Services.
* For values to track, click
(Laetitia Volga, edited by Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
Copyright © 2023 Thomson Reuters