Wall Street opens lower to start holiday-shortened week
By Yuri Kageyama And Matt Ott, The Associated Press on February 21, 2023.
NEW YORK (AP) – Stocks are falling on Wall Street amid worries about upcoming profits for companies and the tightening squeeze of higher interest rates. The S&P 500 was 0.9% lower early Tuesday after being closed Monday for Presidents Day. The Nasdaq composite and the Dow also fell. Home Depot and Walmart both fell despite reporting stronger profit for the last three months of 2022 than expected. For both, the worry was about upcoming earnings after they gave forecasts that fell short of Wall Street’s expectations. Home Depot said it would spend $1 billion to increase wages for hourly U.S. and Canadian workers. THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below. Futures on Wall Street dipped Tuesday, extending last week’s selling that dragged the benchmark S&P to its first back-to-back weekly declines since the turn of the year. Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average S&P 500 each slid 0.8% before the bell opened a holiday-shortened trading week. Global shares were mostly lower after manufacturing indicators in Europe and Asia painted a mixed picture and Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Western countries of threatening Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin railed against the West Tuesday in a long-delayed state-of-the-nation address that shed light on how the Kremlin sees its bogged-down war in Ukraine. Such geopolitical factors add to uncertainties over slowing growth and weakening consumer demand in many economies. Home Depot shares slid almost 4% in premarket Tuesday after the home improvement retailer gave a tepid outlook for this year despite posting strong profits to close out 2022. Walmart also posted annual earnings and its shares slipped for the same reason. Markets turned turbulent in February after a strong start to the year, after optimism faded that the Federal Reserve would ease back on its aggressive monetary policies as it tries to tamp down inflation. Recent economic reports have raised worries that inflation is not cooling as quickly and as smoothly as hoped. In Europe, surveys of factory managers showed improvement in the manufacturing outlook in Britain but contractions in France and Germany. France’s CAC 40 and Germany’s DAX each lost 0.4% in midday trading in Europe. Britain’s FTSE 100 edged down 0.2%. In Japan, a preliminary manufacturing indicator, the flash purchasing manager’s index, or PMI, fell to 47.4 in February from 48.9 the month before. That was the weakest reading in more than two years. Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 shed 0.2% to 27,473.10. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 slipped 0.2% to 7,336.30. South Korea’s Kospi gained nearly 0.2% to 2,458.96. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dipped 1.8% to 20,517.91, while the Shanghai Composite gained 0.5% to 3,306.52. It was unclear if newly issued rules on overseas initial public offerings by Chinese companies had any significant impact on trading. China cleared the way for more companies to join foreign stock exchanges but issued rules that might make the stock offering process more time-consuming by requiring stricter regulatory scrutiny in advance. This week will bring updates on U.S. manufacturing and housing and minutes from the last meeting of the Federal Reserve that might provide insights into the outlook for inflation and interest rates. In energy trading, benchmark U.S. crude picked up 72 cents to $77.06 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude, the international pricing standard, lost 50 cents to $83.57 a barrel. In currency trading, the U.S. dollar inched up to 134.76 Japanese yen from 134.26 yen. The euro cost $1.0655, down from $1.0689. ___ Kageyama reported from Tokyo; Ott reported from Silver Spring, Md. 20-19
