The S&P 500 slipped into the red on Thursday despite the second-quarter earnings season starting off strongly. Wall Street ended the session mixed, with the Dow Jones climbing slightly higher, while the Nasdaq shedded over 100 points.
Investors remain cautious towards the end of the week as benchmarks sit near record highs and inflation remains a concern.
Here's how the market settled Thursday:
S&P 500 Index
Dow Jones Industrial Average
Nasdaq Composite Index
Fed Chair Powell testifies for second day before Congress:
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told Senate lawmakers during his second day of Congressional testimony on Thursday that the central bank will continue to evaluate U.S. economic recovery before tightening its loose monetary policy.
"The challenge we're confronting is how to react to this inflation, which is larger than we had expected or that anybody had expected," Powell told the Senate Banking Committee. "To the extent that it is temporary, then it wouldn't be appropriate to react to that. But to the extent that it gets longer and longer, we'll have to continue to reevaluate the risks that would affect inflation expectations and would be of longer duration and that's what we're monitoring."
Netflix to expand into video game streaming:
Netflix
Verdu will join Netflix as the company's new vice president of game development, under Chief Operating Officer Greg Peters, the streaming giant said. Verdu was previously Facebook's vice president in charge of games and other content for the company's Oculus virtual-reality headsets.
Johnson & Johnson voluntarily recall several aerosol sunscreens due to cancer-causing chemical:
Johnson & Johnson
The pharmaceutical giant warned that consumers should discontinue use of these products and discard them after internal testing found low levels of benzene in multiple samples. The company is also notifying distributors and retailers to halt sales of the products and arranging for customer returns.
J&J stated that benzene is not an ingredient in its sunscreen products and is investigating the contamination. Benzene is classified as a human carcinogen, which can potentially cause cancer depending on the level and extent of exposure.
"Daily exposure to benzene in these aerosol sunscreen products at the levels detected in our testing would not be expected to cause adverse health consequences," J&J said in a statement.
Here's how the market started trading after open:
S&P 500 Index: -0.21% or -9.22 points to 4,365.08
Dow Jones Industrial Average: -0.32% or -110.42 points to 34,822.81
Nasdaq Composite Index: -0.24% or -34.41 points to 14,610.34
Jobless claims fall to new pandemic-era low:
Initial jobless claims fell to a fresh pandemic-era low on Thursday as the U.S. labor market continues its choppy recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
New unemployment claims for the week ended July 10 totaled 360,000, according to the Labor Department, coming below the previous week's upwardly revised total of 386,000 and marking the lowest weekly level since March 2020.
Continuing jobless claims totaled 3.241 million during the week ended July 3, also falling to the lowest level since the start of the pandemic.
