In part, the Department of Labor reported that approximately 9.9 million new jobs were announced in February, significantly fewer than the experts had predicted. The job statistics are one of the factors that the central bank, the Federal Reserve, attaches great importance to when deciding on interest rate policy.
On the one hand, new figures showed that industrial companies’ order intake weakened more than expected in February. Of Wall Street’s eleven industry indexes, it was also the engineering sector that lost the most: down 2.3 percent.
The broad S&P 500 index and the Dow Jones industrial average both retreated 0.6 percent. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index fell 0.5 percent.