Stocks plunge, with the S&P 500 ending its worst week since March 2023
Wall Street ended its worst week in 18 months after a weaker-than-expected jobs report on Friday stoked investor concerns about slowing U.S. economic growth.
Technology stocks took the brunt of the pain. The Nasdaq composite sank 2.6% as Broadcom, Nvidia and other tech companies led the market lower on continued worries that their shares soared too high in the boom around artificial intelligence.
The S&P 500 tumbled 1.7% on Friday, capping the broad-based index's worst week since March 2023. The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 410 points, or 1%, after flipping an early gain of 250 points.
The market swooned after the August jobs report showed U.S. employers hired fewer workers than economists expected, while government data showed that hiring was even weaker in July than earlier reported. It's the second straight month where hiring has come in below forecasts, worsening worries after recent data showed weakness in manufacturing and some other areas of the economy.
Friday's rout comes a month after markets tumbled on a disappointing July jobs report, which also sparked fears that the U.S. labor market is cracking under the highest interest rates in 23 years.
"Markets have had to grapple with — just as the Fed is doing — whether the August payroll data reflects a labor market normalizing towards pre-Covid levels or whether it's indicative of an economy losing dangerous momentum," noted Quincy Krosby, chief global strategist for LPL Financial, in an email.
Krosby added, "The lower unemployment number versus the downward revisions presents a quandary given the pattern of downward revisions indicating more serious economic conditions becoming entrenched."
The action was even wilder in the bond market, where Treasury yields tumbled, recovered and then fell again following the jobs report.
Such a weakening in the job market is actually just what the Federal Reserve and its chair, Jerome Powell, have been trying to induce in order to stifle high inflation, "but only to a certain extent and the data is now testing Chair Powell's stated limits," said Scott Wren, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
Expected Fed rate cut
The weaker-than-expected hiring is raising questions about how much the Federal Reserve will have to cut its main interest rate by at its meeting later this month.
Powell has already indicated the Fed is likely to cut rates for the first time since the 2020 COVID crash. The Fed wants to protect the job market and keep the economy from sliding into a recession after keeping the federal funds rate at a two-decade high for more than a year.
Such cuts can boost investment prices, particularly if the Fed jumps beyond the traditional-sized move of a quarter of a percentage point. But the worry on Wall Street is that the Fed may be moving too little, too late and that the slowing U.S. economy could fall into a recession. That would undercut corporate profits and erase the benefits from lower rates.
"All is not well with the labor market," said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management. "The Fed wanted the labor market to come into better balance, but any balancing act is unstable."
Fed's Waller: Economic data "requires action"
Still, the jobs report did include some more encouraging data points. For one, the unemployment rate improved to 4.2% from 4.3% a month earlier. That was better than economists expected. And even if August's hiring was weaker than forecast, it was still better than July's pace.
Christopher Waller, a member of the Fed's board of governors, said in a speech after the jobs report's release that recent economic data supports a new direction from the central bank, noting, "the current batch of data no longer requires patience, it requires action."
"While the labor market has clearly cooled, based on the evidence I see, I do not believe the economy is in a recession or necessarily headed for one soon," he said.
While Waller said he thinks a "series of reductions" to rates is appropriate given that a slowing job market now looks like the bigger threat for the economy than high inflation, he also said the ultimate pace and depth of those cuts is still to be determined.
Broadcom, Nvidia tumble
On Wall Street, Broadcom tumbled 10.4% despite reporting profit and revenue for the latest quarter that were above analysts' forecasts, thanks in large part to the boom around artificial intelligence. The chip company said it expects to make $14 billion in revenue this quarter, which was slightly below analysts' expectations of $14.11 billion, according to FactSet.
Other chip companies also fell, including a 4% drop for Nvidia. After soaring earlier this year as its revenue surged due to the AI frenzy, Nvidia's stock has been shaky since mid-July as investors question whether they took it too high. That's even though Nvidia has continued to top analysts' expectations for growth.
Big Tech companies have grown into the market's most influential after their superstar runs made them even more massive, and Nvidia was Friday's single heaviest weight on the S&P 500.
The losses were nevertheless widespread, and more than 80% of stocks in the S&P 500 were falling. The smaller stocks in the Russell 2000, whose profits tend to be more closely tied with the strength of the U.S. economy than many big multinationals, fell 1.9%.
On the winning side of Wall Street was U.S. Steel, which rose 4.3% after the CEO of rival Cleveland Cliffs told MSNBC that his company would still be interested in acquiring U.S. Steel if the White House were to block its proposed sale to Japan's Nippon Steel. Lourenco Goncalves also accused Nippon of frequent breaches of trade policies and cited national security issues if the proposed $14 billion Nippon-U.S. Steel were to go through.
