new York The faltering talks on a ceasefire in Ukraine are keeping US investors from buying. The US standard value index Dow Jones closed 1.6 percent lower on Thursday at 34,678 points. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 1.5 percent to 14,220 points. The broad S&P 500 lost 1.6 percent to 4530 points.
Disappointing US consumer spending also weighed on sentiment, said Eric Diton, chief executive of wealth manager Wealth Alliance. “The Fed probably won’t have to raise rates as much as people think because high prices are dampening consumption.” Consumer spending rose just 0.2 percent in February. Analysts had expected more than double the increase. US consumer spending is seen as the mainstay of the largest economy.
Stock market traders hoped to draw further conclusions about the health of the US economy and the pace of the expected interest rate hikes from the labor market data due to be published on Friday. Experts predict 490,000 jobs will be created outside of US agriculture in March. In the previous month, the plus was 678,000.
Investors also followed developments on the energy markets closely. The government around US President Joe Biden wants to throw up to 180 million barrels onto the market in order to reduce the current supply bottleneck and prevent a further rise in prices. In addition, an extraordinary meeting of the International Energy Agency (IEA) was called for Friday, at which other states could join the USA. “Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures,” said Hargreaves Landsdown brokerage analyst Susannah Streeter. “The release of one million barrels per day for the next six months indicates that no quick solution is expected in the Ukraine conflict.”
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The price of US oil grade WTI fell by 6.2 percent to $101.16 per barrel (159 liters). This pushed the shares of oil companies like Exxon and Chevron down up to 1.6 percent.
Stock marketers were nervous about the announcement by Russian President Vladimir Putin that his country’s gas deliveries would have to be paid for in rubles from Friday. Western buyers reject this changeover. Against this background, the price of US natural gas rose by up to four percent to a two-month high of $5.83 per million BTU.
Individual values in focus
Once again, the losers in the US stock market included the US stocks of Chinese companies. The titles of the search engine operator Baidu and its holding iQIYI, a streaming provider, fell by eight and ten percent. Because of a dispute over access to documents by Chinese auditors, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reportedly put Baidu on a list of companies threatened with delisting. Online retailers Alibaba, Pinduoduo and JD.com, which are facing a similar fate, tumbled as much as 8.3 percent.
The papers from Clovis Oncology posted the second-biggest daily profit in the company’s history with an increase of almost 75 percent at times to $2.88. The rally was triggered by encouraging test results for a drug used to treat ovarian cancer.
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