Wall Street ends up, after brief downward detour on Powell firing confusion
By David
French
Wed July 16, 2025 4:43 PM
The day started as a near-disaster as all the indexes took a big dive right around 11 a.m., the Dow down nearly 300 points, but it only lasted about 30 minutes before a rebound began. The trigger was a brief leak of news reports that Trump was ready to fire Jerome Powell which created a momentary panic over losing the independence of the Fed and the subsequent damage that would do to the economy. No matter that that independence meant that Trump had no authority to do any such thing any more than he has the authority to fire Hakeem Jeffries. There was still a panic but after only ½ hour, Trump himself issued a statement that the reports were false and he had no such intention, though this did not stop him from continuing his attacks on Powell for not lowering rates fast enough.
But all three indexes did head steadily north after that, also helped by the fact that today’s PPI showed inflation being flat even though prices were still up because of tariffs, this was offset by services being down. This was enough to offset yesterday’s CPI which created serious concerns about climbing inflation, the PPI putting investors more in the mind that inflation may not be so bad after all. More big banks reported for Q2 and, like yesterday, rising profits did not translate into higher stock prices, which is mysterious. Per the CBOE, volume came in at 17.9 billion, a tad above the 17.5 average.
DJ: 44,023.29 -436.36 NAS: 20,677.80
+37.47 S&P: 6,243.76
-24.80 7/15
DJ: 44,254.78 +231.49 NAS: 20,730.49 +52.69 S&P: 6,263.70 +19.94 7/16
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