NEW YORK — Wall Street is stumbling toward the finish line of a fourth straight losing week on Friday, but an ease in oil prices is taking some of the pressure off stock markets worldwide.
The S&P 500 fell 0.5% in early trading and was on track for its longest weekly losing streak in a year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 126 points, or 0.3%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.8% lower.
U.S. stocks slipped under the weight of another rise for yields in the bond market. That makes borrowing more expensive for U.S. companies and households, slowing the economy, and it grinds down on prices for all kinds of investments. Treasury yields have been climbing since the war with Iran began because it could cause a long-term spike in oil and natural gas prices that drives up inflation.
Worries have gotten so high that traders have canceled bets that the Federal Reserve could cut interest rates multiple times this year, or even jut once, according to data from CME Group. Some are even seeing a slight possibility of a rate hike in 2026, a nearly unthinkable scenario before the war began.
Lower interest rates would give the economy and investment prices a boost, and they're something President Donald Trump has angrily been calling for, but they risk worsening inflation.
Outside of Wall Street, many stock markets elsewhere in the world held up better following their wipeout on Thursday. Indexes inched higher in Europe and 0.3% in South Korea, though Chinese markets sank.
They benefited from Friday’s pullback in oil prices, whose moves have been the main driver of markets for weeks. A barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, slipped 0.3% to $108.29. Benchmark U.S. crude was close to unchanged at $95.53 per barrel.
The price of Brent has zigzagged sharply on its way there from roughly $70 per barrel before the war began. Big swings up and down have struck hour to hour as financial markets try to handicap how long the war will last and how much damage it will do to oil and gas production in the Persian Gulf. Much of the focus is on the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway off Iran's coast. A fifth of the world's oil typically sails through it, but Iran has effectively closed it to its enemies.
On Wall Street, Super Micro Computer dropped 28.2% and helped drag the U.S. stock market lower. The FBI accused a senior vice president of the company and two others affiliated with it of conspiring to smuggle billions of dollars of computer servers containing advanced Nvidia chips to China.
The company said it’s cooperated with the investigation and is not a defendant in the indictment. It placed its two accused employees on administrative leave and terminated its relationship with an accused contractor.
On the winning side of Wall Street was FedEx, which rose 2.8% after delivering much stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.32% from 4.25% late Thursday and from just 3.97% before the war started.
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AP Business Writers Chan Ho-him and Matt Ott contributed.
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