(News Bulletin 247) – Wall Street suffered on Tuesday from a rise in concerns surrounding consumption, after the publications of Walmart and Home Depot. The Dow Jones fell almost 2.1% to 33,130 points, while the Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.5% to 11,492 points.

Investors seemed particularly irritated by the disappointing publication of Walmart, the world’s number one retailer having certainly delivered quarterly results that exceeded expectations, but also prospects that were less solid than expected.

If the title has still managed to grab 0.6% thanks to a 2% increase in its dividend, the market has heavily sanctioned the DIY specialist Home Depot, whose action fell by 7.1% on forecasts deemed disappointing here again.

The outlook drawn by these two distribution heavyweights therefore led investors to wonder about the resistance of household consumption, the main engine of the American economy, to persistent inflationary pressures.

Still in the news of values, operators have welcomed increases in forecasts from the supplier of medical equipment Medtronic (+0.8%) and especially from the food group General Mills (+4.4%).

On the data front of the day, the S&P Global composite PMI for the US improved to 50.2 in ‘flash’ estimate for February, marking an eight-month high, compared to 46, 8 the previous month.

‘The private sector is gaining momentum on the back of a weaker contraction in demand’, noted S&P Global, specifying however that while service providers saw their activity recover timidly, manufacturing production continued to contract.

Also on the economic front, sales of existing homes fell 0.7% in January to an annualized pace of four million, according to seasonally adjusted data from the National Association of Realtors.

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