Financial News

Financial News:

Stocks lower…Spending request for hurricane…Legal tender

NEW YORK (AP) – Stocks have been lower this afternoon as traders return from the Labor Day weekend. Industrial and health care stocks were the biggest drag on the market. The S&P 500 lost 0.2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.5% and the technology-heavy Nasdaq rose 0.2%. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note climbed to 1.37%, which helped lift bank stocks like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.

WASHINGTON (AP) – The White House is asking Congress to approve an additional $24 billion in spending to handle the costs of Hurricane Ida and other natural disasters. It also is seeking $6.4 billion for the resettlement of evacuees from Afghanistan to help with transportation, government processing and public health screenings. Shalanda Young, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, laid out the stopgap funding requests in a blog post.

WASHINGTON (AP) – The company overseeing the response to a large oil spill spurred by Hurricane Ida says a containment dome has been placed over a broken undersea pipeline. Houston-based Talos Energy said in a statement that the action has stemmed the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The company said its oil spill response contractor installed the dome Monday evening.

GENEVA (AP – The head of a top association of pharmaceutical makers says they are now churning out coronavirus vaccine doses at a rate of about 1.5 billion a month, so wealthy governments that have been sitting on stockpiles of doses “no longer need to do so.” The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations says rising production can help offset gaping inequalities in access to COVID-19 doses that have put developing countries far behind in vaccination rates.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) – El Salvador has become the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, but the rollout stumbled in its first hours. President Nayib Bukele said the digital wallet used for transactions was not functioning. For part of the morning, El Salvador’s president became tech support for a nation stepping into the world of cryptocurrency. Bukele marshaled his Twitter account to walk users through what was happening. Bukele explained that the digital wallet Chivo had been disconnected while server capacity was increased.