US stocks fell on Friday as the possibility of a US$14 billion fine against Deutsche Bank weighed on big banks and investors wrestled with lingering uncertainty about when the US Federal Reserve would hike interest rates.
The settlement proposal, made during negotiations between the US Department of Justice and Deutsche Bank over claims that the German bank missold mortgage-backed securities, was larger than expected.
Deutsche Bank’s US-listed shares slumped 9.35 percent. Dow components Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan fell by more than 1 percent each.
Photo: Bloomberg
The S&P 500 financial index dropped 0.91 percent, dragging down the benchmark index the most. The KBW Bank index fell 1.11 percent and logged its second straight week of declines.
Traders have all but ruled out the possibility of the Fed raising interest rates at its meeting, which starts on Tuesday. However, residual doubts and questions about when the Fed might finally pull the trigger still hurt sentiment.
“It’s the uncertainty of next week, the complacency of investors trying to re-evaluate their portfolios as we prepare for an interest-rate hike,” said Jeff Carbone, cofounder of Cornerstone Financial Partners in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The Dow Jones industrial average lost 0.49 percent to finish at 18,123.80 points and the S&P 500 fell 0.38 percent to 2,139.16.
The NASDAQ Composite fell 0.1 percent to 5,244.57.
With futures and options contracts expiring, about 9.3 billion shares changed hands on US exchanges, above the 6.6 billion daily average for the past 20 trading days, according to Thomson Reuters data.
For the week, the Dow edged up 0.2 percent, the S&P gained 0.5 percent and the NASDAQ jumped 2.3 percent.
The technology index on Friday dropped 0.33 percent, pulled down by Apple’s 0.56 percent decline and Oracle’s 4.75 percent drop following weak quarterly profit.
Helping limit losses was Intel’s 3.04 percent gain to a 15-year high after the chipmaker raised its third-quarter revenue forecast.
The CBOE Market Volatility index, Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” declined 5.7 percent.
Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by a 1.79-to-1 ratio; on NASDAQ, a 1.18-to-1 ratio favored decliners.
The S&P 500 posted 5 new 52-week highs and 2 new lows; the NASDAQ Composite recorded 88 new highs and 50 new lows.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the