They looked past a report showing weekly jobless claims plunging to a 52-year low. National Securities Chief Market Strategist Art Hogan says Wall Street and the Fed are focused on inflation, anxious over the consumer price data that comes out Friday and the Federal Reserve's policy meeting next week.
"This is a day where we thought we'd probably celebrate a terrific jobless claims number, but we may have already celebrated that over the last three days. So today is that day were most investors are saying, you know what? It's probably OK to take a pause here. Let's see how CPI comes out tomorrow morning. And let's hear how that makes us think about what the Fed has to say on Wednesday."
The Dow shed more than 150 points. The S&P 500 retreated a fifth of a percent, and the Nasdaq dipped a tenth of a percent.
Shares of Amazon fell. Italy slapped the e-commerce giant with a $1.3 billion fine for alleged abuse of its market dominance.
CVS Health rose. The drugstore operator hiked its full-year profit outlook. Administering COVID-19 vaccinations and diagnostic testing significantly boosted its quarterly operating profit.
Shares of the poster boy for meme stocks, GameStop, fell. The video game retailer said the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission issued a subpoena in August for documents on an investigation into its share trading activity. The company also reported a quarterly loss that was more than double what analysts expected.
Starbucks declined. Workers voted to join a union at one store in Buffalo, New York, but rejected the union at a second location in the city.
