NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) – At the end of a good week overall, Wall Street has recently weakened a bit. A strong labor market report initially provided some relief on Friday, but then worries over the recently flared up dispute between the US and China gained the upper hand.
The US leading index Dow Jones Industrial fell 0.21 percent to 27,328.79 points. For the market-wide S&P 500 it went down 0.31 percent to 3338.79 meters.
The technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 suffered even more clearly from profit-taking and lost 1.49 percent to 11,099.48 points. The selection index Nasdaq Composite had struggled to reach a record high before turning into the red and most recently losing more than 1 percent.
The US labor market report had been awaited with particular suspense as it should be interpreted as an indication of the question whether the increasing economic optimism in the United States is justified. In fact, according to the data, employment in the USA rose surprisingly significantly in July, which made up for the sharp slump in the Corona crisis.
Analyst Michael Hewson from the trading house CMC Markets pointed out that the figures did not include the past two weeks, and thus also not the increasing number of infections and the new regional lockdowns. In any case, the ups and downs in the US labor market are currently difficult to capture in the figures, as the retrospective strongly revised upwards data for May and June showed.
In view of the renewed dispute between Washington and Beijing, the US government had announced that it would take action on a broad front against “untrustworthy apps from China” and want to remove them from the app stores. Names like the video app Tiktok and the messenger service Wechat were mentioned. The US increased the pressure on China ahead of the planned meeting of the two countries on August 15, wrote Stephen Innes of AxiCorp. The Beijing government spoke of “bullying”.
A strong quarterly report paired with a surprisingly good outlook gave the papers of T-Mobile US a strong plus of around six percent. In the course of trading, the shares held by the Deutsche Telekom mobile phone subsidiary had reached an all-time high.
Biogen shares rose by around eight percent. An Alzheimer’s drug from the pharmaceutical company is now being given priority review by the US FDA. Depending on the design of an approval decision that now appears to be more likely, there will be considerable sales potential, but this cannot be reliably assessed at the moment, wrote analyst Elmar Kraus from DZ Bank./la/he
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