Big banks weighed on the stock market Wednesday, tugging major indexes back from record highs.
Regulators from the U.S., Switzerland and the U.K. fined five major banks a total of $3.4 billion for conspiring to manipulate foreign-currency trading. The news drove down bank stocks in Europe and the U.S.
JPMorgan Chase fell more than 1 percent, the biggest drop in the Dow Jones industrial average.
“The fines from the watchdogs took some of the wind out of the market,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Rockwell Global Capital Management. But a slight dip after five days of record highs “is actually healthy,” he said. “That’s the sign of a good bull market. Going straight up every day would be reckless.”
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index slipped 1.43 point to end at 2,038.25. The Dow lost 2.70 points to 17,612.20, and the Nasdaq composite rose 14.58 points, or 0.3 percent, to 4,675.13.
On Tuesday, the S&P 500 closed at a record high for the fifth straight day.
Major markets in Europe closed with bigger losses. France’s CAC 40 dropped 1.5 percent, while Germany’s DAX lost 1.7 percent. Britain’s FTSE 100 sank 0.2 percent.
Back in the U.S., J.M. Smucker dropped 4 percent, the worst loss in the S&P 500. The maker of Jif peanut butter, fruit jams and other products trimmed its full-year profit forecast, saying higher prices for Folgers coffee have hurt sales. J.M. Smucker’s stock fell $3.70 to $100.38.
In a week light on major economic reports, investors were looking ahead to the government’s monthly look on retail sales, due Friday. Wall Street’s economists expect the Commerce Department to say sales inched up 0.2 percent last month. Sales fell in September.
Prices for U.S. government bonds barely budged, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury note holding tight at 2.36 percent. The bond market was closed Tuesday for Veterans Day.
In the commodity markets, the price of gold lost $3.90 to settle at $1,159.10 an ounce. Silver slid 6 cents to $15.62 an ounce while copper ended unchanged at $3.03 a pound.
The price of crude oil hit a four-year low on more signs of rising supplies. Benchmark U.S. crude lost 76 cents to close at $77.18 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude, an international benchmark used by many U.S. refineries, fell $1.29 cents to close at $80.38 a barrel, also a four-year low, in London.
