Wall Street’s major indices fell on Friday as US President Donald Trump raised the possibility of additional tariffs on Chinese imports and Apple Inc indicated that some of its products could be subjected to such levies.
US stocks were lower for most of Friday’s session, but dipped further in the last half-hour of trading on reports that Apple products, including the Apple Watch and AirPods, would be slapped with duties.
Apple shares, which had been in positive territory for most of the session, ended 0.8 percent lower.
The company provided those details in response to the White House’s proposed tariffs on US$200 billion worth of Chinese imports.
A comment period for those tariffs ended on Thursday night.
Earlier on Friday, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Trump would not make any decisions on those tariffs until officials evaluated public comments.
“Apple is a bellwether name,” said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial in Newark, New Jersey. “[That is] why we may be seeing some profit-taking going into the weekend.”
US stocks had already been pressured after Trump said he had tariffs ready to impose on an additional US$267 billion worth of Chinese imports, on top of the proposed US$200 billion.
The escalated trade rhetoric contributed to anxiety among investors regarding the market’s outlook.
“There’s the possibility of [China] devaluing its currency again, which pushes up the dollar and turns the pressure up on US exporters,” Krosby said.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday fell 79.33 points, or 0.31 percent, to 25,916.54, the S&P 500 lost 6.37 points, or 0.22 percent, to 2,871.68 and the NASDAQ Composite dropped 20.19 points, or 0.25 percent, to 7,902.54.
For the week, the Dow lost 0.19 percent, the S&P fell 1.03 percent, and the NASDAQ shed 2.55 percent.
The NASDAQ registered its greatest weekly percentage decline since late March, while the S&P’s weekly percentage drop was its biggest since late June.
The S&P and Dow had opened lower after the US Department of Labor’s employment report showed accelerating job growth and a surge in wage growth.
Although the report indicated a strong economy, it raised concerns among investors regarding inflation and the US Federal Reserve’s plans for increasing interest rates.
With the added pressures from trade concerns, 10 out of the S&P’s 11 major sectors ended lower. Only health care stocks posted gains.
Shares of chipmaker Broadcom Inc rose 7.7 percent after a strong current-quarter revenue forecast.
Tesla Inc shares slid 6.3 percent following reports of two executives leaving the company and on mounting investor concerns about chief executive Elon Musk’s behavior after he smoked marijuana on a live podcast.
Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones on the New York Stock Exchange by a 2.21-to-1 ratio; on NASDAQ, a 1.24-to-1 ratio favored decliners.
The S&P 500 posted 37 new 52-week highs and 16 new lows; the NASDAQ Composite recorded 99 new highs and 66 new lows.
Volume on US exchanges was 6.25 billion shares, compared with the 6.2 billion average over the past 20 trading days.
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
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
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts