Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has indicated that markets may have been too confident in their hopes that the central bank would introduce interest rate cuts in the near term. During an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Powell spoke of the “danger of moving too soon is that the job’s not quite done.”
In response to this news, stocks on the New York Stock Exchange stopped in their tracks, thereby pausing a recent rally. Futures on the S&P 500 fell by 0.2%, as did those on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, while contracts listed on the Nasdaq 100 edged 0.1% lower. In Europe, equities on the Stoxx Europe 600 remained stagnant.
The US dollar also posted little movement, although the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index rose 0.2% to its highest level since December 11. The euro fell 0.2% to $1.0771 while the Japanese yen remained little changed at 148.39 per dollar.