Stocks Sink Under Pressure From Bond Market

Wall Street fell under the weight of pressure from the bond market Tuesday.

• The S&P 500 fell 44.72 points, or 0.7%, to 6,415.54.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 249.07 points, or 0.6%, to 45,295.81.
• The Nasdaq composite fell 175.92 points, or 0.8%, to 21,279.63 .

Big Tech stocks that have received criticism after their prices shot higher in recent years were the heaviest weights on the market, the AP reports. Rising yields in the bond market cranked up the pressure for all kinds of stocks.

Nvidia, whose chips are powering much of the world's move into artificial-intelligence technology, fell 2% and was the single strongest force pulling the S&P 500 downward. Amazon sank 1.6%, and Alphabet dropped 0.7%. Constellation Brands tumbled 6.6% after the beer, wine, and spirits company warned that it's seen a slowdown in purchases of its high-end beers, particularly among its Hispanic customers. That pushed it to slash its forecast for profit this fiscal year. Kraft Heinz fell 7% after announcing that it's splitting into two, a decade after a merger of the brands created one of the biggest food companies on the planet.

The overall stock market felt pressure from rising yields in the bond market, where the 10-year Treasury yield climbed to 4.27% from 4.23% late Friday. When bonds are paying more in interest, investors are less willing to pay high prices for stocks. Longer-term bond yields are on the rise around the world, in part because of worries about how difficult it will be for governments to repay their growing mountains of debt. In the US, longer-term Treasury yields are feeling added pressure from President Trump's attacks on the Federal Reserve for not cutting interest rates sooner. The fear is that a less independent Fed will be less likely to make the unpopular decisions needed to keep inflation under control over the long term, such as keeping short-term rates higher than investors would like.

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In another signal of increasing worries in financial markets, the price of gold rose to touch another record. Treasury yields briefly trimmed their gains after a report on Tuesday said US manufacturing shrank by more last month than economists expected. Many companies told the Institute for Supply Management that tariffs are continuing to make conditions chaotic. The worse-than-expected data on manufacturing could give the Federal Reserve more leeway to cut its main interest rate for the first time this year at its next meeting in a couple of weeks.