Stocks waver as investors brace for Fed tightening

Stocks waver as investors brace for Fed tightening

US and European stocks fluctuated on Thursday after minutes from central banks showed US policymakers ready to aggressively wind back easy-money policies while their eurozone counterparts disagreed over their own way forward. Eurozone stock markets were higher in afternoon deals but London’s FTSE 100 ticked lower. Wall Street was mixed in early trading, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq up while the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 were lower. Oil prices, meanwhile, pared some of the previous day’s heavy losses that had been triggered by concerns about weaker demand because of economic slowdown. Minutes showed the Fed in March opted to raise US borrowing costs rates by a quarter percentage point, mindful of “greater near-term uncertainty associated with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”. But some policymakers had favoured lifting rates even higher, by half a percentage point, to rein in decades-high inflation which is threatening to derail the economic recovery. “The stock market, as well as the Treasury market, looks as if it is struggling to figure out the future and how it will be shaped by the Fed’s hawkish-minded shift in setting monetary policy,” Briefing.com analyst Patrick O’Hare said. But the analyst added that the stock market “intuitively knows the