Consumer gloom grips Wall Street

Australian News.Net
Tuesday 30th June, 2009

Stocks fell on Tuesday after the Conference Board's take on consumer confidence in June came in worse than expected.

"Consumer confidence is the excuse du jour for the latest market move," Tom Alexander, head of Alexander Trading, in Savannah, Georgia told the Reuters newsagency.

"For the market to go much higher, you are going to have to see some real hard evidence of some of these things that are being anticipated by the market start to come to fruition. Pick one. Are the bank balance sheets really cleaned up? Nobody knows. The market has gone up on a lot of faith here."

At the close of trading Tuesday, the last day of the quarter, the Dow Jones was down 82.38 points or 0.97% at 8,447.00.

The Nasdaq Composite was down 9.02 points or 0.49% at 1,835.04.

The Standard and Poor's 500 was down 7.91 points or 0.85% at 919.32.

The U.S. dollar was a fraction stronger, rising to 1.4025 against the euro around the New York close Tuesday.

The Japanese yen nudged down to 96.34, while the British pound slipped to 1.6449. The Swiss franc was little changed at 1.0866, whereas the Australian dollar dipped to .8050.

The Canadian dollar tumbled to 1.1626.

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