Wall Street slips amid China woes post FOMC minutes

US stocks edged lower as traders return from the Independence Day holiday to monitor headwinds for the global economy and after the release of Fed’s minutes for June monetary policy meeting.

The S&P 500 was down 0.1%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped by around 0.3% or about 100 points. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 0.1%. A surprisingly sharp fall in Chinese services activity stoked concerns about the health of the world’s second-biggest economy, against a backdrop of building tensions in the US-China trade war.

FOMC minutes showed some Fed officials favoured a rate hike but decided on a pause. During the same policy meeting, the minutes showed almost all officials believed it would be “appropriate or acceptable” to leave rates unchanged at 5.00% to 5.25%. Still, almost all officials “judged that additional increases in the target federal funds rate during 2023 would be appropriate”.