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Wall Street ends lower after Powell remarks
STORY: U.S. stocks ended slightly lower in choppy trading on Wednesday after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told a Senate committee that the central bank was not trying to engineer a recession to fight inflation, but acknowledged that raising interest rates could spark one.POWELL: “It’s certainly a possibility.”Tom Hainlin is global investment strategist at U.S. Bank.”That’s the needle the Fed’s trying to thread, which is how do you bring down inflation without bringing demand so far down that you end up with a corporate profit contraction or an economic recession? So that’s the needle they’re trying to thread. Their policy is a pretty blunt instrument, it’s just a broad interest rate policy. And it’s a blunt instrument to try to slow down consumer demand and business demand just enough to get supply and demand back in balance without bringing demand too far down.”All three major indexes finished in the red, but each one only down fractionally.Energy stocks, which have been strong performers this year, fell along with oil prices, which dropped 3% on Wednesday.Shares of Dow slid after Credit Suisse downgraded the chemicals maker’s stock to “underperform,” saying the company was “over-earning” amid issues with supply chains and will likely take a hit as they normalize.And, finally, shares of Revlon – which filed for bankruptcy last week – soared 32% in heavy trading, riding a wave of recent retail investor interest to become the latest so-called meme stock.
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