Wall Street Close: Bulls shudder in the face of dying stimulus hopes
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.58%.
- The S&P 500 fell 0.66.
- The Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.8%.
Wall Street's three major benchmarks fell on Wednesday as hopes faded away that an agreement for a fresh stimulus package could be reached in coming weeks.
Downbeat comments from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin kicked the bulls into touch when he said, "at this point getting something done before the election and executing on that would be difficult, just given where we are and the level of detail, but we're going to try to continue to work through these issues."
The House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi also confirmed the lack of progress and said that the two sides were "far apart" on some details.
Of the S&P's 11 major sectors, consumer discretionary S5COND was the biggest laggard as Amazon.com AMZN tumbled more than 2%.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.58% to end at 28,514 points, while the S&P 500 fell 0.66% to 3,488.67. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.8% to 11,768.73.
As for US data, US September Producer Price Index beat expectations, rising 0.4% m/m across headline and core measures.
''The annual headline rate rose to 0.4% YoY from ‑0.2% YoY in August and core rose to 1.2% YoY from 0.6%.
A 3.9% MoM, the rise in the price of accommodation services, was the main driver of the rise. PPI inflation is still adjusting to the volatility of the COVID-19 crisis, but at 0.4% YoY is way short of what is needed to fuel inflation,'' analysts at ANZ Bank explained.
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