Stock market today: Wall Street drifts lower, dragged down by tech and anxiety over China tariffs

The Hill

05-02-2025

Wall Street shifted lower in early trading Wednesday as markets took in more corporate earnings reports while considering the impact of tariffs being imposed by the United States and China.
Futures for the S&P 500 were off 0.4%, while technology stocks dragged Nasdaq futures down 0.8% before the bell. Futures for the Dow Jones Industrials were off 0.1%.
Google parent company Alphabet tumbled 7.1% after its latest earnings report disappointed investors, who had been expecting more robust revenue from the company's cloud business related to artificial intelligence.
Despite beating analysts' sales and profit targets for the most recent quarter, shares of Advanced Micro Devices skidded nearly 10% as revenue from its data centers fell short of Wall Street expectations.
Walt Disney Co. shares rose about 1% after the entertainment giant beat first-quarter profit expectations thanks in part to the box office success of 'Moana 2.'
Mattel soared more than 13% in premarket after the toy and game maker beat Wall Street's earnings projections and gave a strong profit outlook for 2025.
Some analysts see tariffs on China as separate from Trump's moves against other trading partners. Trump may be more likely to keep tariffs on China longer, as he did in his first presidential term, to separate the United States more from its geopolitical rival.
Trump is pressing ahead with a 10% tariff on U.S. companies importing things from China. And China retaliated on Tuesday by announcing its own tariffs on some U.S. products and an antitrust investigation into Google.
Media reports on Wednesday suggested that Chinese regulators are considering a similar probe in to Apple's App Store policies. Shares of Apple slid more than 2% before the bell.
China's 15% tariff on U.S. coal and liquefied natural gas products, as well as a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery and large-engine cars imported from the United States won't take effect until Monday. That leaves time for negotiations between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
'Trade tensions haven't exploded yet, but they're simmering dangerously close to a full boil, and anyone brushing them off does so at their own risk,' said Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management.
Trump on Monday agreed to delay his taxes on U.S. imports of Canadian and Mexican products for a month. Some traders hope Trump would likely be turned off by the damage Wall Street would take if a worst-case, long-term trade war were to occur. Trump has pointed in the past to the stock market as a real-time measure of his performance.
But a trade war is still possible, and some analysts say more swings may be coming because Trump's threats should be taken seriously.
At midday in Europe, France's CAC 40 shed 0.2%, while Germany's DAX fell 0.1%. Britain's FTSE 100 was up 0.2%.
Earlier in the global day in Asia, Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 recouped earlier losses and was little changed, finishing up less than 0.1% at 38,831.48.
Among Japanese issues, the stock price of Honda Motor Co. shot up 8.2% after Japanese media reports said its talks to set up a joint holding company with rival Nissan Motor Corp. were unraveling. Nissan stock tumbled 4.9%.
Australia's S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.5% to 8,416.90. The Hang Seng dropped 0.9% to 20,597.09, while the Shanghai Composite lost 0.7% to 3,229.49.
South Korea's Kospi jumped 1.1% to 2,509.27, as investors found bargains after the recent price dips and found optimism from the overnight Wall Street rally.
In energy trading, benchmark U.S. crude fell 83 cents to $71.89 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, declined 88 cents to $75.32 a barrel.