NEW YORK — U.S. stocks are drifting in mixed trading Monday following the latest discouraging signal on the U.S. economy and ahead of President Donald Trump’s latest deadline on tariffs.
The S&P 500 was 0.2% lower in morning trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 3 points, or less than 0.1%, as of 10: 25 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.4% lower.
Wall Street is coming off a rocky couple of weeks, starting after the S&P 500 set a record following a parade of fatter-than-expected profit reports from big U.S. companies. Then, the market dove sharply amid several weaker-than-expected reports on the U.S. economy, including a couple showing U.S. households are getting much more pessimistic about inflation because of the threat of tariffs.
The latest report to show less economic strength than expected came Monday morning on U.S. manufacturing. Overall activity is still growing, but not by as much as economists had forecast. Perhaps more discouragingly, manufacturers are seeing a contraction in new orders. Prices, meanwhile, rose amid discussions about who will pay for Trump’s tariffs.
“Demand eased, production stabilized, and destaffing continued as panelists’ companies experience the first operational shock of the new administration’s tariff policy,” said Timothy Fiore, chair of the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing business survey committee.
A set of tariffs announced by Trump on Canada, Mexico and China is set to take effect on Tuesday, but he has shown he can pull back on such announcements at the last minute. That’s what he did a month ago, when he delayed implementation of the taxes on imports from Canada and Mexico.
The hope on Wall Street is that Trump is using the threat of tariffs as a tool for negotiations and that he’ll ultimately go through with policies that would mean less damage for the global economy and trade. Tariffs could raise prices on everyday items even more for U.S. households, when high inflation has proven to be stubborn to subdue fully.
The market’s recent slump has hit Nvidia and some other formerly high-flying areas of the market particularly hard. They were mixed on Monday, with Nvidia down 4.4% but Elon Musk’s Tesla up 1.9%.
Elsewhere on Wall Street, Kroger fell 1.5% after the grocery chain’s Chairman and CEO Rodney McMullen resigned following an internal investigation into his personal conduct.
Stocks of companies enmeshed in the cryptocurrency economy did better after Trump said over the weekend that his administration was moving forward with a crypto strategic reserve.
MicroStrategy, the company that’s now known as Strategy and has been rais