Get free Markets updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email every morning with the latest market news.
U.S. stocks fell and oil prices hit 2023 highs on Tuesday, raising investor concerns about increasing price pressures a day before the release of the closely watched U.S. inflation report.
Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 slipped 0.3 as declines in Apple and several other big technology stocks outweighed a rise in oil and gas companies. The Nasdaq Composite lost 0.7 percent.
Traders are looking ahead to Wednesday’s U.S. consumer price index numbers, which will be the last major economic data before the Federal Reserve announces its decision on interest rates next week. Officials signaled earlier this month that they would keep interest rates stable at the upcoming meeting.
The annual price growth rate in the world’s largest economy is expected to have risen to 3.6 percent in August, from 3.2 percent the previous month.
“While this will not impact next week’s Fed decision, where a pause is widely expected, it would point to hawkish risks to the overall Fed outlook,” said Benjamin Schroeder, senior interest rate strategist at ING.
By contrast, core inflation, which excludes volatile energy and food costs, is expected to fall to 4.3 percent from an annual rate of 4.7 percent in July.
The rise in headline inflation is expected in part because oil prices have risen steadily since mid-summer as top producers Russia and Saudi Arabia announced a series of supply cuts expected to last through the end of the year.
Oil prices rose further on Tuesday after OPEC forecast a tighter supply outlook and growing demand in 2024 in its monthly report.
Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose 1.8 percent to $92.28 a barrel on Tuesday and U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate rose 2 percent to $89.10. Both prices reached their highest level since November 2022.
The energy sector of the S&P 500 was the benchmark’s top performer, up 2.3 percent.
Among individual stock moves on Wall Street, Apple lost 1.7 percent in afternoon trading after the technology company unveiled its latest iPhones in a presentation. The company’s stock price came under pressure last week after Beijing ordered some officials not to use iPhones or other foreign devices for work.
Elsewhere, British government bond yields and the pound fell as investors took mixed jobs data as a sign the labor market could be cooling.
The pound weakened 0.2 percent to trade at $1.2481 against the dollar after figures showed record wage growth despite signs of a weakening labor market.
The yield on interest-sensitive two-year government bonds fell 0.05 percentage points to 5.02 percent and the yield on the 10-year government bond fell by a similar amount to 4.42 percent. Bond yields move inversely to prices.
The UK unemployment rate rose to 4.3 percent in the three months to July, above the Bank of England’s forecast for the third quarter. However, annual wage growth was 7.8 percent in the three months to July, the highest rate since records began in 2001.
The pace of wage growth has helped convince the majority of market participants that the BoE will raise interest rates, already at a 15-year high, by another quarter point to 5.5 percent next week.
“The labor market signals were simply too strong to justify a pause in rate hikes,” said Hugh Gimber, global market strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management.
The jobs data comes a day after Catherine Mann, one of the central bank’s more hawkish policymakers, said she would remain “more on the side of too much tightening” as price pressures remain well above the BoE target.
In Europe, the regional Stoxx Europe 600 gave up early gains and ended the day down 0.2 percent.
Asian stocks showed a mixed picture: Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index fell 0.4 percent and China’s CSI 300 fell 0.2 percent, while Japan’s Topix rose 0.8 percent.
Source : www.ft.com