US market closed lower as geopolitical risks linger

13 Apr 2017 Evaluate

The US markets closed lower on Wednesday, as investors remained cautious amid persistent geopolitical risks. The main indexes briefly trimmed losses as US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with the Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to discuss the civil war in Syria and nuclear capabilities of North Korea. Sergei Lavrov said Moscow wasn’t convinced of chemical attack in Syria, but both countries agreed that a United Nations-led probe is necessary.

Meanwhile, Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Robert Kaplan joined many of his colleagues in saying that the US central bank could start shrinking its $4.5 trillion balance sheet later this year, even as it raises rates gradually and patiently. He added that he still sees three rate hikes this year as his baseline case, and that plans to shed the Fed’s assets do not change that view. Kaplan enlightened that Fed acquired trillions of dollars’ worth of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities during years of quantitative easing designed to push down long-term borrowing costs and pull the economy out faster from the Great Recession. Now that the labor market is nearly healed and inflation is rising toward the Fed’s 2-percent goal, Fed officials want to start shrinking that portfolio. Broad measures of US unemployment show there is still slack in the labor market, but it is getting tighter. Unemployment in March was 4.5 percent, below what most Fed officials see as full employment.

On the economy front, the price of US imports fell in March for the first time in four months owing to lower costs for oil, but prices of many other goods continued to rise. The import price index dropped 0.2% in March. It’s the first decline since November. The cost of fuel retreated 3.8% in March, the biggest drop in more than a year. Lower prices for one of the nation’s biggest imports kept overall import prices in check. Yet if fuel is set aside, import prices climbed 0.2% last month to accentuate an upward trend that began last year. Most of the increase was in industrial supplies. The cost of imported food and consumer goods such as electronic fell, however. Over the past year, import prices have risen 4.2%. By contrast, they were falling at a 6.1% annual rate one year earlier. The cost of imports excluding energy has climbed a much smaller 1% in the past 12 months, underscoring the influence of oil on the US economy.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 59.44 points or 0.29 percent to 20,591.86, the Nasdaq was down 30.61 points or 0.52 percent to 5,836.16, while S&P 500 dropped 8.85 points or 0.38 percent to 2,344.93.

The Indian ADRs closed mostly in red; Tata Motors was down 0.70%, Dr. Reddy’s Lab was down 0.48% and Infosys was down 0.08%. On the other hand, HDFC Bank was up 0.31% and ICICI Bank was up 0.14%.

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