Stocks fell lower Tuesday as a new warning hung over the U.S. banking system, reigniting concerns from earlier this year over the health of the financial sector. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 150 points, while the S&P 500 Index and Nasdaq Composite lost 0.40% and 0.80%, respectively.
Here's how the market settled on Tuesday:
S&P 500 Index
Dow Jones Industrial Average
Nasdaq Composite Index
Impacting markets on Tuesday, Moody's downgraded the credit rating of several U.S. regional banks, warning that stresses still persist from the banking crisis sparked in March.
"Many banks' second-quarter results showed growing profitability pressures that will reduce their ability to generate internal capital," Moody's analysts Jill Cetina and Ana Arsov wrote in a note Tuesday. "This comes as a mild U.S. recession is on the horizon for early 2024 and asset quality looks set to decline," warning further that the credit rating firm may downgrade some of the nation's largest lenders -- including Bank of New York Mellon
The downgrade also comes as the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate to a range of 5.25% to 5.5%. Market participants are anxiously looking ahead towards the release of another key inflation report for July on Thursday, which will offer more clues for the central bank's further monetary policy for the last half of the year.
Currently, traders are expecting an 86.5% chance the Fed will hold rates at the conclusion of its September meeting, according to the CME FedWatch Tool. Meanwhile, investors are pricing a 71.4% probability policymakers will hold rates at their November meeting.
"Interest rates are likely to remain higher for longer until inflation returns to within the Fed's target range and, as noted earlier, longer-term U.S. interest rates also are moving higher because of multiple factors, which will put further pressure on banks' fixed-rate assets," Moody's said in the research note.
On the earnings front, UPS
Eli Lilly
Palantir Technologies
"We anticipate that we will become eligible for inclusion in the S&P 500 after we report our financial results for Q3 2023 in early November," CEO Alex Karp wrote in a letter to shareholders. "At that point, we will have been profitable on a cumulative basis over the preceding four quarters."
In single-stock news, Amazon
Tilray Brands
Nvidia
"We're giving this processor a boost," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, adding that the new chip is "designed for the scale-out of the world's data centers."
Looking ahead, market participants will react to earnings reports from companies including Lyft
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