Wall Street indexes closed slightly lower and the dollar gained with Treasury yields as investors digested data on Monday, May 1, and waited for thedue on Wednesday, May 3, as well as key upcoming economic data and quarterly earnings reports.
Matt Stucky, senior portfolio manager at Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management, saw Monday’s data solidifying widely held expectations for the Fed to increase interest rates by 25 basis points in May and increasing the probability for a June hike. As a result, Stucky was surprised that the equity market did not react more negatively on Monday, even with support fromafter regulators seized the troubled lender, marking the third major US bank failure in two months.
“You’ve a whole stew of data coming out this week. You don’t know if the cioppino is going to be hot, mild, or somewhere in between, which is why you have the market hanging around this unchanged level,” he said.