By Gavin Adamson
(April 14 – 17:00 ET) – Major North American indices continued to drop based on a report that U.S. inflation is rearing its head. Consumer prices crept up in March according to the latest price index. Fear is rampant that the U.S. Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates more than expected in coming months .
The Dow Jones industrial average was hit hard, losing 616.23 points, to 10,307.32. It was led down by financial stocks like Citigroup and American Express. The only Dow issue that climbed was Exxon.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 was punished as well, with the index losing 83.59 points to 1,356.56, with 75 of 88 industry groups closing lower. The inflation fears only added to the on-going re-evalution of tech stock share prices.
Nasdaq was stripped of another 356.89 points to 3,319.93. Qualcomm led the techs down, but Microsoft dropped again, as did Intel and Oracle. Cisco and Nextel were thrown in the pool of red ink too.
JDS Uniphase, dually listed on the Nasdaq, was a leader on the way down on the TSE 300 composite as well. The stock dropped by C$15.40 to $119. The index lost 491.91 points, dropping to 8,473.50. Nortel and BCE slipped by $9.55 to $136.45 and $13.50 to $139 respectively. Investors knocked off another $6.90 off of Research in Motion too. Certicom lost $17.25 to $65.
Some Toronto Stock Exchange resource stocks made small gains. But the financials, which have capped TSE loses this week, didn’t hold up against the U.S. inflation news. The Royal Bank lost $4.60 to $71.50. The Toronto Dominion Bank finished at $35.50 to $2.10, and BMO was off $3.85 to $52.
Techs also led the Canadian Venture Exchange way down. As a group, they were off more than 16%, with Unique Broadband System, deflating by nearly 24% to $3.93, Ecompark down 17% to $1.39, and Nuvo Network Management off by 23% to $1.35. The composite index dropped by 374.13 points to 3,51.95.