Wall St. ends lower after Powell dims hopes for rate cut

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STORY: Wall Street's main indexes closed lower on Thursday after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell dampened investors' hopes for another interest rate cut this year.

The Dow dropped nearly half a percent, the S&P 500 lost six-tenths of a percent while the Nasdaq shed roughly the same.

Speaking at a Dallas Fed event, Powell said that with the economy still growing, the job market solid and inflation still above the Fed's 2% target, the central bank need not rush to cut interest rates.

FED CHAIR JEROME POWELL: "The economy is not sending any signals that we need to be in a hurry to lower rates."

His comments dropped traders' bets for a December rate cut to roughly 56% from 82% a day earlier, according to CME's FedWatch tool.

Brian Krawez, president at Scharf Investments, said that the Fed's next policy moves may be just one of several warning signs ahead.

"While everyone's sort of convinced that the Fed has engineered a soft landing, the reality is soft landings are actually really rare. And so there's still in our view, you know, heightened chances of a recession occurring. The other two things are you've got geopolitical risk, which seems to have been shoved onto the back burner, but you've got a lot going on in the Middle East. You've got the Ukraine situation and the incoming administration is going to have to deal with both of those. And so that's going to create potential volatility."

Among individual movers, shares of EV maker Tesla lost nearly 6% and Rivian Automotive dropped more than 14% after Reuters reported that Trump's transition team is planning to kill the $7,500 consumer tax credit for electric-vehicle purchases as part of broader tax-reform legislation.

Tapestry shares closed up nearly 13% after hitting their highest level since July of 2013. The Coach parent said it was terminating its $8.5 billion deal for Capri Holdings after the deal was blocked by a U.S. judge. Capri's shares rose 4.4%.