US stocks drifted lower Tuesday in their return to trading from a three-day weekend after the latest fighting in the war with Iran pushed oil prices higher.
- The S&P 500 fell 45.08 points, or 0.6%, to 7,673.52.
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 628.18 points, or 1.2%, to 52,786.07.
- The Nasdaq composite fell 85.58 points, or 0.3%, to 26,421.41.
Stocks felt pressure after the cost for a barrel of Brent briefly
neared $99.50, the
AP reports. More expensive oil has worsened worries about inflation and is giving extra heft to a couple of reports on inflation that are coming later this week. They will be the final updates the Federal Reserve hears before its meeting on interest rates next week.
On Wall Street, Boston Scientific fell 5.9% after saying that a network outage earlier this summer caused by a cybersecurity incident means that it is unlikely to meet forecasts it gave for sales and profit for the third quarter and for the full year of 2026. The biotech firm expects to make back some of the revenue as it continues to ramp operations globally, fulfill customer orders, and reduce remaining backlogs, but it doesn't yet know the full impact. Shares of Novartis that trade in the United States tumbled 13.9% after the Swiss pharmaceutical company gave a discouraging update on a study of a therapy for people living with myotonic dystrophy type 1, a neuromuscular disease.
- Qualcomm helped limit the market's losses after rising 3.2%. It announced a deal to collaborate with Amazon on large-scale AI data centers. The deal also gives Amazon the right to acquire up to 25 million of Qualcomm's shares at $161.26 per share.
On Thursday, the US government will release its August report for inflation at the wholesale level, which economists expect will show an acceleration to 5.4% from 4.7% in July. The more closely watched report on inflation that US consumers are feeling will arrive on Friday. That update will show how much more people are paying for groceries, clothes and other costs of living, and economists expect it eased a bit to 3.3% from July's 3.4% inflation rate. That, though, remains well above the 2% target that the Federal Reserve has set as its goal.
The traditional move for the Fed when inflation is high is to raise its main interest rate. That, in turn, would filter out into the rest of the bond market, make it more expensive for companies and people to borrow, slow the overall economy, undercut prices for investments, and hopefully rein in inflation. But President Trump has been lobbying for lower interest rates instead, which could give the economy—and inflation—an extra kick. The Fed's new chairman, Kevin Warsh, has said he wants to give financial markets fewer clues about what the Fed plans to do with interest rates in the short term. That all has traders betting on a 60% probability that the Fed will raise its federal funds rate at the conclusion of its next meeting on Sept. 16, according to data from CME Group.
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