FINANCIAL MARKETS
NEW YORK—Stocks fell slightly on Tuesday in another quiet day on Wall Street as hesitant investors remained on the sidelines as a slow summer winds down. Shares of the candy company Hershey plunged after it walked away from a merger proposal, and Apple slipped after the company was hit with a large tax bill in Europe.
Investors continue to wait to see whether the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates later this year. The next key piece of data is coming on Friday with the August jobs report. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 48.69 points, or 0.3 percent, to 18,454.30. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 4.26 points, or 0.2 percent, to 2,176.12 and the Nasdaq composite fell 9.34 points, or 0.2 percent, to 5,222.99. Trading was extremely light once again, with roughly 2.95 billion shares changing hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the seventh-slowest day of the year. Monday was the slowest trading day of 2016. Banks are a major beneficiary of rising interest rates since they can charge more for loans when interest rates rise. Bank of America rose 35 cents, or 2 percent, to $16.19, Wells Fargo rose $1.06, or 2 percent, to $50.62 and Morgan Stanley rose 78 cents, or 2.5 percent, to $32.19.
Investors are waiting to see if the Labor Department’s monthly jobs survey this week indicates whether the U.S. economy remains on solid footing. Economists expect employers added 182,500 jobs in August and that the unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.8 percent. A strong jobs report would give the Federal Reserve additional ammunition to raise interest rates either at its September meeting or later this year. In other company news, Hershey fell $12.02, or 11 percent, to $99.65 after snack food company Mondelez International said it was walking away from its proposal to buy Hershey for roughly $25 billion.
Apple fell 82 cents, or 0.8 percent, to $106 after the European Union ruled that it has to pay $14.5 billion in back taxes. Both Apple and Ireland said they would appeal the decision, which is the EU’s latest and most aggressive move in its campaign to have multinationals pay a fair tax rate. In energy trading, benchmark U.S. crude oil fell 63 cents to $46.35 a barrel. Brent crude, used to price oil internationally, fell 89 cents to $48.37 a barrel. In other energy commodities, heating oil fell 1.5 cents to $1.471 a gallon, wholesale gasoline fell 1.9 cents to $1.448 a gallon and natural gas fell 7 cents to $2.827 per thousand cubic feet.