(News Bulletin 247) – Red dominated on Wall Street on Thursday, except for the Dow Jones which gained 0.17% to 34,500 ‘all round’ (thanks to Intel which gained +3.3% and the three pharmaceutical giants -the most defensive stocks in the ‘Dow’- up +1.4% on average).

The S&P500 dipped into the red (-0.32% to 4451) and the Nasdaq Composite fell almost 0.9% to 13748, which is quite reassuring after an initial drop of -1.5% and a test of 13700 at the low of the day.

Wall Street limited the damage, but it would be premature to rejoice: the nervousness of investors pushed the ‘VIX’ to around 16, before a saving – and somewhat unexpected – relaxation brought this index back to equilibrium towards 15.35 (despite the decline of the ‘S&P’).

While Apple’s initial drop was close to -5%, cheap buyers reduced the loss to -2.9% (this was the most active stock of the day with 90 million shares traded against 54 million in average since June).

The title of the Apple technology firm took its suppliers in its wake: Qualcomm weighed in with all its weight with -7.2%, as well as Western Digital with -4.2% and Applied Materials with -3.2% .

The ‘Apple’ ecosystem remained under pressure for a second consecutive session for the same reason: Beijing is beginning to restrict or ban the use of foreign brand smartphones by Chinese officials in their workplace.

Everyone has understood that this mainly penalizes Apple, all the more so 10 days from the presentation of the iPhone ’15’ and a few weeks from its marketing (China represented 20% of sales of the latest model each year) .

Investors experienced another reason for gloom with the publication of statistics which did not rule out the hypothesis of a final tightening of the Fed’s key rates in early November.

Indeed, the robustness of the labor market continued to surprise: the number of jobless claims in the United States fell by another 13,000 last week, to 216,000 according to the Labor Department (lowest total for seven months). .

The four-week moving average – considered a better indicator of the underlying trend in the employment market – showed a sharp drop of 8,500 in the number of registrations compared to the previous week, to 229,250.

Nothing encouraging on the non-agricultural productivity side: it only increased by 3.5% in the second quarter of 2023 at an annualized rate, still according to the Department of Labor, which had announced it to be up by 3.7% in preliminary estimate. a month ago.

Given a 5.7% increase in hourly wages (two points higher than inflation), non-agricultural unit labor costs in the United States increased by 2.2% in the second quarter, despite this increase in productivity.

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