Stocks, Bonds Steady as Oil Halts War-Fueled Rally: Markets Wrap
(Bloomberg) — A pullback in oil prices brought some relief to Wall Street traders worried about inflation, with stocks and bonds stabilizing after recent losses.
West Texas Intermediate crude fell below $90, halting a two-day surge triggered by fighting between the US and Iran over control of the Strait of Hormuz. The respite left Treasury yields were little changed after a surge to multi-year highs. The S&P 500 barely budged. Dell Technologies Inc. jumped 11% on a solid outlook. Broadcom Inc. reports results after the close.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York President John Williams said there’s evidence inflation continues to ease as the impact of tariffs fades while higher energy prices are not spreading to other services.
“The data recently has been encouraging,” Williams said Wednesday in an interview with CNBC. “I am actually seeing the trend in inflation moving slowly down as some of the effects of the tariffs move into the rearview mirror.”
In the run-up to Friday’s payrolls report, data showed US companies added jobs at a more moderate pace in August. Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh last week acknowledged some pockets of concern, but said the labor market overall is consistent with full employment.
The upcoming US employment report is expected to show a 55,000 increase in total payrolls in August. That would mark a turnaround from July, when nonfarm employment fell 23,000.
The S&P 500 is projected to swing just 0.7% in either direction on Friday, in line with the average realized move on jobs-report days over the past 12 months, according to data compiled by Citigroup Inc.
Corporate Highlights:
Dell Technologies Inc. boosted its annual sales forecast by $25 billion in a further sign of surging demand for servers to run artificial-intelligence tasks. Nvidia Corp. is in advanced talks to acquire AI startup Hugging Face in a transaction that may total about $14 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Uber Technologies Inc. is cutting about 3,300 roles, or 10% of its staff globally, in a massive restructuring aimed at reducing management layers and reallocating spending into its ride-sharing, delivery and robotaxi businesses. Chevron Corp. plans to invest $7 billion over the next five years through its joint venture partnerships to more than double crude production in Venezuela, the largest financial commitment so far in a US government-led push to revive the Latin American country’s oil industry. PG&E Corp. plans to defer about $2 billion of investments next year as part of a strategic review of its businesses, a move that comes after it said a proposed revamp of California’s wildfire response didn’t do enough to protect the company and its peers from the cost of such disasters. Some of the main moves in markets:
Stocks
The S&P 500 was little changed as of 9:32 a.m. New York time The Nasdaq 100 fell 0.2% The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.4% The Stoxx Europe 600 fell 0.1% The MSCI World Index was little changed Currencies
The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index fell 0.1% The euro was unchanged at $1.1593 The British pound fell 0.1% to $1.3496 The Japanese yen rose 0.7% to 158.99 per dollar Cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin fell 0.9% to $76,713.85 Ether fell 1.5% to $2,384.94 Bonds
The yield on 10-year Treasuries was little changed at 4.79% Germany’s 10-year yield advanced three basis points to 3.37% Britain’s 10-year yield advanced one basis point to 5.23% Commodities
West Texas Intermediate crude fell 0.8% to $89.51 a barrel Spot gold rose 0.8% to $4,365.36 an ounce ©2026 Bloomberg L.P.
