Wall Street closes in red and the Dow Jones falls 0.30%

Wall Street closed this Wednesday with losses for the third consecutive day and the Dow Jones Industrials, its main indicator, fell 0.30%, after the president of the United States Federal Reserve (Fed), Jerome Powell, pointed out today that, after the pause in June, it is likely that interest rates will continue to rise in the coming months.

At the end of operations in New York, the Dow Jones stood at 33,951 points, while the selective S&P 500 fell 0.52%, to 4,365 integers.

The Nasdaq market composite index, in which most of the most important technology companies are listed, dropped 1.21% and ended at 13,502 units.

“Almost all the participants of the Federal Open Market Committee”the body of the Fed that decides on rate hikes, believe that it will be “appropriate to raise interest rates a little more by the end of the year,” Powell told the Committee on Financial Services of the US House of Representatives.

The Fed, he added, will continue to make its decisions “meeting by meeting” based on “the totality of incoming data and their implications for the outlook for economic activity and inflation, as well as the balance of risks.”

The “inflationary pressures” -said the president of the US regulator- “remain high” and the process of bringing inflation back down to 2% “has a long way to go.”

All this despite the fact that the year-on-year rate of inflation fell considerably in May, nine tenths, to stand at 4%, its lowest level since March 2021. It was the second most pronounced drop in the consumer price index since it began to down eleven months ago.

The Fed’s next meeting will take place on July 25 and 26, and before the end of the year, committee members will hold three more meetings in September, October, and December.

By sectors, the biggest gains were for energy and public services, which rose 0.92% and 0.84%, respectively. Meanwhile, the greatest losses were for technology and communications, which remained 1.41% and 1.36%, respectively.

Among the 30 Dow Jones stocks, the companies with the biggest losses were Intel (-6%) and Salesforce (-3.4%), while the biggest gains were for UnitedHeath (1.57%) and Procter & Gamble (0 .86%).

In other markets, Texas oil closed at US$72.53 a barrel, and at the close of the stock market the yield on the ten-year US bond fell to 3.721%, gold fell to $1,944 an ounce and the dollar lost ground against the euro, with a change of 1.0985.