A dramatic session on Wall Street ended with stocks slightly lower on Friday as they pared losses in late-afternoon trading after Republicans pulled their bill to overhaul the US healthcare system.
The benchmark S&P 500 shot up briefly into positive territory before falling back into the red as Republicans pulled the legislation due to a shortage of votes just before the markets closed, leaving investors to assess how the healthcare bill’s failure would affect US President Donald Trump’s broader economic agenda.
Investors had worried earlier this week that the failure of the bill, which would have dismantled the law known as Obamacare, would prove an ominous sign for Trump’s ability to push through his economic agenda, including tax reform.
However, some analysts and investors have seen a failure of the bill as a catalyst to bring forward action on tax reform in particular.
“Now that they’ve taken the healthcare issue off the table, I think the market is more optimistic that they can do other things that are more doable that are not so complicated, such as regulatory reform and lowering taxes,” said Margaret Patel, senior portfolio manager at Wells Fargo Asset Management in Boston.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday fell 59.86 points, or 0.29 percent, to end at 20,596.72, the S&P 500 lost 1.98 points, or 0.08 percent, to 2,343.98 and the NASDAQ Composite added 11.05 points, or 0.19 percent, to 5,828.74.
The back-and-forth over the bill this week has led to some of the most volatile trading Wall Street has seen since Trump’s election in November last year.
For the week, the S&P 500 fell 1.4 percent, its worst weekly decline of the year, the Dow lost 1.5 percent and the NASDAQ Composite fell 1.2 percent.
“This is now an indication that the [US] president’s agenda is probably going to be more ambitious than Congress can manage,” said Peter Kenny, senior market strategist at Global Markets Advisory Group in New York. “It is probably going to mean that equity markets are going to have to factor in a degree of dysfunction that investors were hoping they wouldn’t have to.”
The S&P 500 has climbed 9.6 percent since Trump’s election, notching a series of record highs along the way.
However, the rally has stalled recently, and Tuesday’s 1.2 percent drop set off concerns about the beginning of a larger fall.
“The economy and earnings were doing better since before the election,” said Paul Zemsky, chief investment officer for multi-asset strategies and solutions at Voya Investment Management in New York. “If people want to drop the S&P by 300 points because this doesn’t pass, I and others will be down there to buy it.”
Shares of hospital operators finished sharply higher, with Tenet Healthcare Corp up 7.4 percent. The potential dismantling of Obamacare has pressured hospital stocks over concerns the benefits the companies gained from coverage expansion would diminish.
In corporate news, Micron Technology Inc jumped 7.4 percent after the chipmaker’s revenue and profit forecasts beat expectations. The stock was the biggest percentage gainer on the S&P and helped lift the NASDAQ.
GameStop Corp tumbled 13.6 percent after the company’s profit projection fell below estimates.
Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the New York Stock Exchange by a 1.07-to-1 ratio; on NASDAQ, a 1.30-to-1 ratio favored advancers.
The S&P 500 posted 19 new 52-week highs and three new lows; the NASDAQ Composite recorded 58 new highs and 40 new lows.
About 6.2 billion shares changed hands in US exchanges on Friday, below the 7.1 billion daily average over the past 20 sessions.
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
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day