Wall Street had another volatile day of on Tuesday, falling nearly 2 percent before recovering later in the session. Technology stocks continued to struggle.
Stocks have dropped recently as a rise in U.S. inflation expectations and bond yields has raised concerns that the Federal Reserve will tighten its monetary policy sooner than expected, upending the easy-money policies that have helped bolster stocks during the pandemic.
The central bank’s policymakers have said they would look past a short-term rise inflation and keep supporting the economy, a message that Jerome H. Powell, the central bank chair, repeated in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday.
Stocks
-
The S&P 500 ended slightly higher on Tuesday, breaking a weeklong losing streak. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite fell half a percent.
-
Tesla shares dropped as much as 9 percent before recovering some ground, after falling about 9 percent on Monday as Bitcoin prices also tumbled. Over the weekend, Elon Musk tweeted that prices of Bitcoin and Ether, the two largest cryptocurrencies, “do seem high.” A few weeks ago, the electric carmaker said it bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, sending prices of both soaring.
Europe
-
The Stoxx 600 Europe fell 0.4 percent.
-
The unemployment rate in Britain rose to 5.1 percent for the three months ending in December, 1.4 percentage points higher than it was a year earlier, official statistics showed on Tuesday. Job losses have fallen particularly hard on young people: The number of employees on company payrolls has declined by 726,000 in the past year, nearly three-fifths of these workers were under 25.
