Wall Street stocks declined early Monday as markets confront lingering recession worries that threaten the late-December traditional upturn in equities.
Stocks often rally near the end of the calendar year, when trading volumes are scant, news flow is limited and investors are feeling festive in a dynamic known as a “Santa Claus rally.”
But investors continue to fixate on the risk of a global downturn in the aftermath of the latest batch of central bank interest rate increases enacted to address grinding inflation.
“Christmas is approaching and Santa has yet to be seen,” said Briefing.com analyst Patrick O’Hare.
“The stock market is very much off balance in this typically good month as growth concerns have come to the fore. They won’t disappear overnight either like Frosty in a greenhouse.”
About 20 minutes into trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down less than 0.1 percent at 32,914.52.
The broad-based S&P 500 shed 0.4 percent to 3,838.08, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index dropped 0.8 percent to 10,617.63.
Among individual companies, Aerojet Rocketdyne rose 1.7 percent after agreeing to be acquired by L3Harris Technologies for $4.7 billion in a combination the companies said would promote weapons development and space technology.
Tesla jumped 2.9 percent after Chief Executive Elon Musk, who also owns and runs Twitter, learned from a poll of Twitter users that a majority of the social media company’s participants want him to step down.
Tesla shares have fallen sharply in 2022 throughout Musk’s Twitter saga.
