


NEW YORK >> Most U.S. stocks slumped Tuesday after the latest update on inflation hurt Wall Street’s hopes for lower interest rates. The S&P 500 fell 0.4%, although it’s still near its all-time high set last week, as 90% of the stocks within the index fell. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 436 points, or 1%.
Tech stocks were an outlier, though, and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.2% to set another record thanks to Nvidia, the market’s most influential stock.
Stocks felt pressure from a report showing inflation in the United States accelerated to 2.7% last month from 2.4% in May. Economists pointed to increases in prices for clothes, toys and other things that tend to get imported from other countries. Their prices could be rising because of the tariffs that President Donald Trump has proposed on countries worldwide in hopes of getting them to open their markets further to U.S. products.
“Inflation has begun to show the first signs of tariff pass-through,” according to Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. To be sure, the inflation rate reported Tuesday morning wasn’t far from what economists expected. And an underlying measure of inflation that economists think is a better predictor of future trends accelerated by less than feared.
Altogether, the data helped cause Treasury yields to yo-yo a few times in the bond market before they began rising.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury climbed to 4.48% from 4.43% late Monday. The yield on the two-year Treasury, which more closely tracks expectations for what the Federal Reserve will do with short-term interest rates, rose to 3.95% from 3.90%.
A further acceleration in inflation could tie the hands of the Fed, which has been keeping interest rates on hold this year after cutting them at the end of last year. That’s because lower rates can give inflation more fuel, along with a boost for the economy. Wall Street loves lower rates because they goose prices higher for stocks and other investments, and Trump himself has been clamoring for the Fed to cut more quickly.