Stocks slid on Friday, after a wild week that saw the market rally and then collapse in rapid succession, as investors focused on the bad news in the latest update on the U.S. job market.
The S&P 500 fell 1.6 percent in early trading. The index had dropped 3.6 percent on Thursday after rallying 3 percent on Wednesday, and is now on track for its fifth consecutive weekly drop. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite fell 1.9 percent on Friday.
Wall Street’s concern this year has been how quickly the Federal Reserve will withdraw its support for the economy, by raising interest rates and shrinking its holdings of bonds. The moves make risky investments less appealing, ending years of low interest rates and policies meant to keep cash flowing through the financial system, both of which helped fuel a massive rally in stocks.
On Friday, the Labor Department reported that employers added 428,000 jobs in April, while average hourly earnings rose 5.5 percent from a year ago. While the report showed hiring remains resilient, economists have said that the strong job market and wage acceleration could incentivize the central bank to lift interest rates more aggressively.
A particular concern is that climbing wages could fuel inflation, as companies pass on higher employment costs to customers. That could, in turn, prompt workers to demand even higher wages, triggering an upward spiral. Another worrisome sign in the data is that the labor force shrank unexpectedly in April.
The central bank on Wednesday raised interest rates half a percentage point, the biggest increase since 2000. Speaking after the announcement, Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, cited the labor market, and in particular the record number of job openings relative to the number of unemployed workers, as a reason policymakers had become more aggressive in recent months.
“You can see that the labor market is out of balance; you can see that there is a labor shortage,” Mr. Powell said. In April, he described the labor market as “unsustainably hot.”
The Fed is trying to slow demand by making money more expensive to borrow, but investors fear that the Fed will push the economy into a recession as it does so.
“The April jobs data underscore Chairman Powell’s view of the labor market being extraordinarily tight and risking an upward wage-price spiral,” Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. financial economist at Oxford Economics, wrote in a note following the report.
The reaction to the jobs report was evident in the bond market too. The yield on 10-year Treasury notes, a proxy for investor expectations about interest rates, rose to 3.1 percent from 3 percent a day earlier.