Stocks sank Monday in morning trading on Wall Street, putting the benchmark S&P 500 on track for what the market considers a correction—a drop of 10% or more from its most recent high. The S&P 500 fell 2.5% to 4,287.22 in the first hour of trading, putting it down about 10.7% from the high it set on Jan. 4, per the AP. A close of 4,316.90 or lower will officially put it into a correction. (Since dipping into correction territory, the S&P has recovered a bit and was sitting above that threshold.) The Dow and the tech-heavy Nasdaq also were off to similarly in-the-red starts. The declines in the market extend a recent run of losses that have left major indexes in a January slump.
Investors have been growing increasingly worried about how aggressively the Federal Reserve, which holds a policy meeting this week, might act to cool rising inflation. Wall Street anticipates the first increase in interest rates as early as March, and investors have grown increasingly concerned the Fed will have to raise rates more quickly and more often than the central bank originally indicated. The Fed's benchmark short-term interest rate is currently in a range of 0% to 0.25%. Investors now see a nearly 70% chance that the Fed will raise the rate by at least one percentage point by the end of the year, per CME Group's FedWatch tool.
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