Stocks tumble again after the Federal Reserve says it will raise interest rates.

It wasn’t what stock market bulls were hoping for.

Stocks tumbled Wednesday after the Federal Reserve, citing the strength of the economy, signaled that it planned to keep raising interest rates and shrinking the extraordinary amount of support it has provided to financial markets in the decade since the financial crisis.

The S&P 500 finished 1.5 percent lower, bringing its losses for the month to 9.2 percent. The benchmark had been higher ahead of the Fed’s 1 p.m. announcement about interest rates and a news conference that followed.

The central bank raised its benchmark interest rate another quarter percentage point.

That increase had been widely predicted. But in the financial markets, hopes had been high that the Fed would simultaneously signal its growing concern about the outlook for economic growth.

Such an outlook is known as “dovish” in financial market jargon. And there had been broad consensus among stock market analysts that the Fed would announce a “dovish hike” — that is, an increase paired with language that indicated it would slow the pace of tightening substantially — Wednesday. They were disappointed. “There was no give,” said Tony Dwyer, chief market strategist with the brokerage firm Canaccord Genuity in New York. “You were looking for a dovish hike. And it turned out to be just a hike.”

The Fed did acknowledge growing expectations that the world economy could be slowing. Chairman Jerome H. Powell emphasized the bank would tailor its policy in response to economic data.

But generally, the central bank highlighted the ongoing strength of the U.S. economy, a reason not to ease off interest rate increases too fast. Unemployment is near 50-year lows, growth in 2018 has been the fastest in years, and even as stock markets have sold off sharply, incoming numbers show little indication the economy is turning sour.

“The Fed message to the markets is, take a breath,” said Brian Belski, chief investment strategist at BMO Capital Markets in New York. “The Fed did its job today.”

The market did not make a decisive move lower until Powell’s post-decision news conference. Close observers of the stock market noted that losses in the S&P 500 accelerated after Powell answered a reporter’s question about the whether Fed had discussed changing its efforts to shrink the large stockpile of safe government bonds it is holding on its balance sheet.

“I think that the runoff of the balance sheet has been smooth and has served its purpose,” Powell said. “I don’t see us changing that.”

In the years after the financial crisis, the Fed’s balance sheet ballooned as the central bank engaged in multiple rounds of so-called quantitative easing. The policy, in which the Fed effectively created new money and used it to purchase Treasury bonds to push longer-term interest rates lower, was also credited with helping to push a broad range of other asset prices — including stocks, corporate bonds and commodities — up sharply as well.