Wall Street slumps at the open on global growth worries

By Tanya Agrawal

REUTERS - Wall Street fell sharply for the third straight day on Thursday after the Federal Reserve highlighted global growth concerns and as finance stocks declined on speculation that the central bank would not raise interest rates in September.

All the 10 major S&P sectors were lower, with the financial index's 1.3 percent fall leading the decliners.

Bank of America , JPMorgan and Citigroup weighed the most on the index and were down between 1.5-2 percent.

The Fed, in minutes of its latest meeting released on Wednesday, continued to express broad concerns about lagging inflation even as the job market improved further. The comments led traders to scale back bets that rates would be raised in September.

 

At 9:41 a.m. ET (1341 GMT) the Dow Jones industrial average <.DJI> was down 135.9 points, or 0.78 percent, at 17,212.83, the S&P 500 <.SPX> was down 13.05 points, or 0.63 percent, at 2,066.56 and the Nasdaq Composite <.IXIC> was down 35.46 points, or 0.71 percent, at 4,983.60.

Apple's 1.3 percent fall weighed the most on the Nasdaq and the S&P after a Gartner report that said China smartphone sales fell for the first time ever in the second quarter. Apple counts China as a key growth market.

Disney fell 3.7 percent to $102.52 and Time Warner fell 3.3 percent to $75.26 after Bernstein downgraded the two stocks to "market perform". Disney was the biggest drag on the Dow Jones industrial average.

NetApp rose 5.9 percent to $31.60 after the data storage equipment maker's results beat expectations.

Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by 2,210 to 472. On the Nasdaq, 1,905 issues fell and 440 advanced.

The S&P 500 index showed one new 52-week highs and 23 new lows, while the Nasdaq recorded six new highs and 89 new lows.

(Reporting by Tanya Agrawal in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D'Souza)