Stock market today: Wall Street hangs near its records after wild swings in Asian markets
U.S. stocks are hanging near their records following a wild start to the week for financial markets in Asia
NEW YORK — U.S. stocks are hanging near their records Monday following a wild start to the week for financial markets in Asia, where Japanese stocks tumbled and Chinese indexes soared.
The S&P 500 was 0.2% lower in morning trading, coming off its sixth winning week in the last seven. The Dow Jones Industrial Average pulled back 107 points, or 0.3%, from its all-time high set on Friday. The Nasdaq composite was 0.2% lower, as of 10:15 a.m. Eastern time.
It’s a pause for Wall Street following its catapult to records on hopes the slowing U.S. economy can keep growing while the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates to offer it more juice. A big test will arrive Friday, when the U.S. government offers its latest monthly update on the job market.
An overriding worry on Wall Street is whether the economy may already be heading for a recession. Even though the Fed cut rates earlier this month and has indicated more are to come, U.S. employers have already begun slowing their hiring. Before this month, the Fed had kept interest rates at a two-decade high in hopes of slowing the economy enough to stamp out high inflation.
“Payrolls remain the biggest catalyst” for the U.S. stock market until the election, strategists and economists at Bank of America wrote in a BofA Global Research report.
At Goldman Sachs, economist David Mericle said he’s expecting Friday’s report to show hiring in September was stronger than the 146,000 growth in payrolls that economists across Wall Street are broadly forecasting.
In the past, a stronger-than-expected number could have hurt the stock market by fanning worries about upward pressure on
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