NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street drifted through a quiet day of trading on Monday, ahead of economic reports this week that could drive where interest rates go.
The S&P 500 slipped 0.2%, though the majority of stocks within the index rose. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 41 points, or 0.1%, and the Nasdaq composite fell 0.6%.
Helping to keep indexes in check were stocks in the artificial-intelligence industry, which were mixed following last week’s scary swings.
Nvidia, the chip company that’s become the face of the AI boom, added 0.7%. It was one of the strongest forces pushing upward on the S&P 500 after dropping 4.1% last week.
But Oracle sank another 2.7% following its 12.7% tumble last week, which was its worst in more than seven years. Broadcom fell 5.6%.
AI stocks have been shaky on worries that the billions of dollars flowing into chips and data centers may not produce a big-enough payoff to make it worth it. The doubts are causing cracks for the industry, whose earlier surges was the main driver for the U.S. market’s rally to records.
Besides AI, the main focus on Wall Street this week will be on what several big updates on the U.S. economy’s health say.
On Tuesday will come the jobs report for November, and economists expect it to show employers added 40,000 more jobs than they cut during the month. Thursday will bring an update on the inflation, and economists expect it to show U.S. consumers paid prices that were 3.1% higher in November than a year before.
Such data is under the microscope because the Federal Reserve is trying to figure out if a slowing job market or high inflation is the bigger problem for the economy. The Fed is in a potentially tough spot because fixing one of those problems by moving interest rates would likely worsen the other in the short term.
The hope on Wall Street is that the job market weakens, but only by a little: enough to get the Fed to lower interest rates but not so much that a recession swamps the economy. Wall Street loves lower rates because they can give a boost to the…
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