Stock market today: Hot inflation report drops tech, drives S&P 500, Dow and Nasdaq down Grace O'Donnell and Ines Ferré Updated Wed, October 14, 2026 at 2:58 PM EDT 1 min read ^IXIC -2.05% ASML -2.28% ^KS11 -0.44% ^DJI -0.40% ^GSPC -1.31% Trade ASML on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Stocks declined to session lows in afternoon trading on Wednesday as investors digested hotter-than-expected inflation data, and bank earnings continued to roll in.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) slipped 0.4% while the S&P 500 (^GSPC) declined 1.3%. The Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) fell 2% after stocks staggered lower on Tuesday.
September's Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 3.7% year over year, versus 3.6% expected by economists. Higher gas and energy prices drove inflation higher, lowering the odds that the Federal Reserve will hold rates steady at its next policy meeting.
Go deeper with AlphaSpace 26,645.78 -558.60 (-2.05%) As of 2:59:34 PM EDT. Market Open. ^IXIC ^DJI ^GSPC Semiconductor stocks continued to sell off after the KOSPI index (^KS11) declined 12% over the past five days. Chip equipment maker ASML (ASML) on Wednesday posted record third quarter sales and raised its full-year outlook amid strong AI demand. Investors await Taiwan Semiconductor earnings on Thursday (TSM) for further confirmation of the AI boom.
Elsewhere, the parade of financial company earnings continued with results from Bank of America (BAC) and Morgan Stanley (MS). Bank of America stock sank as much as 9% as a $1.2 billion regulatory penalty and a slowdown in its Wall Street machine dented lending income. Meanwhile, BlackRock (BLK) shares rose after third quarter earnings beat analyst expectations. The results round out third quarter reporting among Wall Street's biggest banks, which have indicated consumers are holding up despite higher interest rates, among other signals.
Separately, Apple's (AAPL) market capitalization once again crossed the $5 trillion mark in intraday trading, just months after it first touched the threshold in late July.
Brent crude futures (BZ=F), the global benchmark, remained above $105 per barrel as Houthis continued to bomb Saudi Arabian energy facilities.
The selloff in chip stocks deepened on Wednesday as expectations that the Fed may have to hike rates grew.
Chip giant Nvidia (NVDA) declined more than 3%, leading the sector lower.
A hotter-than-expected inflation print raised the odds that the Fed may have to hike rates at its policy meeting this month.
Memory makers Micron (MU) and SK Hynix (SKHY) also extended declines from recent sessions as fears of growing competition from China spooked investors.
The Comptroller of the Currency said nine of the nation's largest banks denied financial services to customers based on their political, religious, or social beliefs, according to a regulatory review released Wednesday.
The OCC reviewed nearly 100,000 complaints and received approximately 50,000 documents from JPMorgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo Bank, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC Bank, TD Bank, and BMO Bank regarding their policies, procedures, practices, and individual customer decisions.
The federal banking watchdog determined that the banks' sweeping internal guidelines lacked objective, risk-based criteria, effectively shutting out legitimate customers and businesses based on ideological leanings rather than financial risk.
Federal regulators found that lenders restricted certain sectors' access to financial services, including oil and gas exploration; coal mining; firearms or ammunition manufacturing or distribution; construction or operation of detention facilities; and the manufacturing, distribution or online retail of tobacco or e-cigarettes.
Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday that his company would potentially cut off buyers of Nvidia chips if they were found to be developing unsafe AI, pushing Nvidia further into the debate over the potential dangers of AI.
"It's a hypothetical, but yes," Jensen told Bloomberg. "But before you do so, you would have a conversation. We don't run other people's companies, and there's a limit to the judgment we apply to other companies' use of our technology. Our technology is general-purpose."
Nvidia shares traded down by roughly 3.5% on Wednesday.
Given Nvidia is the world's leading supplier of so-called "accelerators," the chips used to train and operate the most advanced AI models produced by frontier labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, any potential move to cut off buyers developing AI Nvidia decided was unsafe could send ripples throughout the broader ecosystem.
Over the past few months, both OpenAI and Anthropic have been criticized for incidents where agents developed using their AI models broke out of so-called "containment" and hacked into other companies or pursued other unethical behavior.
The comments from Huang come after the Nvidia CEO announced an AI safety platform developed by his company, designed to enforce safeguards on AI agents. Huang has repeatedly stated that he doesn't believe in throttling frontier AI development, and that the issue of misalignment — agents acting in ways not aligned with human-instructed goals — is an "engineering problem."
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wants his firm at the center of a new AI chip financing market, likening the opportunity to the rise of mortgage-backed securities in the 1980s during the Wall Street giant's Wednesday earnings call.
"In the early 1980s, mortgages were loans sitting on bank's balance sheets, [ illiquid ] and hard to price. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began cooling them, but that alone didn't make them tradable. What made them tradable was data, years of performance history and understanding of how the performance would move with interest rates and with the changes of the broader economy. Once investors had a trusted time series of data, issuers had a standard to build against and the market opened up for a much bigger group of investors. That combination took the MBS market from a few billion dollars when I started to the trillions of dollars it is today," Fink said.
"Compute capacity is now following a similar path, and we intend at BlackRock to be the center of it as we were then in the beginnings of the mortgage-backed securities market," Fink said.
The New York based asset manager earlier Wednesday reported better-than-expected results.
As Ines Ferré reports, Wednesday marked the 158th day on which prices remained above $4, according to a GasBuddy analysis, breaking the 2022 record of 157.
And it doesn't look like prices will ease anytime soon.
"I think gasoline prices will remain above $4 for the next several months unless there is some resolution between the USA and Iran that results in the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, " Andy Lipow of Lipow Oil Associates told Yahoo Finance on Tuesday.
Semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries will be building two semiconductor production factories in Malta, New York, where the company is based, President Trump said Wednesday.
The project, which the president announced in tandem with the Department of Commerce, will be funded by a $21 billion investment from Japan, President Trump said on social media — part of a major trade scheme the White House has negotiated with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
The first facility is expected to come online in 2029, GlobalFoundries said, announcing also that the Department of Commerce will receive an equity stake of roughly 4% in the company as part of the deal. Shares in the company rose by roughly 5% in the wake of the announcement.
"This DEAL is a result of my HISTORIC TRADE DEALS to REVITALIZE the American Industrial Base, create HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF GREAT AMERICAN JOBS, and strengthen our National and Economic Security," the president wrote on Truth Social.
"We are turning the Investment commitments from Japan, Korea and Taiwan into HUGE Construction Projects. These are TRANSFORMATIONAL AND GENERATIONAL DEALS FOR AMERICA — More Semiconductors, more Power, more Energy Security, and more Jobs for the U.S.A."
The project will create 27,000 construction and supply chain jobs and more than 1,000 manufacturing jobs in New York, Trump said.
The announcement marks a second major investment in the state, after Micron over the summer announced an investment of $100 billion to build a major semiconductor facbrication facility in New York as part of a broader US investment package.
M&A activity may have slowed in Q3 from Q2, but that doesn't mean it's over.
As David Hollerith reports, executives at some of Wall Street's biggest banks, including Goldman Sachs (GS), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Citigroup (C), and Wells Fargo (WFC), said this earnings season that dealmaking remains strong despite market volatility and higher borrowing costs that have slowed activity in recent weeks.
Collectively, these same four banks reported third quarter dealmaking fees totaling $8.47 billion, up 15% from a year earlier, though down 7.5% from a banner second quarter.
"I would lean more on the side of delayed rather than canceled," JPMorgan CFO Jeremy Barnum told reporters Tuesday when asked whether dealmaking momentum would pick up in the fourth quarter.
One of the AI build-out's most critical bottlenecks is on the ballot this year: energy, and the ability for data centers to get the power they need.
That's according to Melius Research managing director James West, who noted to clients on Wednesday that just as the wars in Iran and Ukraine have sent fuel prices surging, data center energy demand has spiked. The combination of those two factors is driving up US ratepayers' energy bills.
"Energy is driving the affordability debate," West wrote. "We expect affordability to keep political tension elevated past November, with large-load cost allocation in PJM a policy risk."
In a midterm cycle set to likely flip control of at least one house of Congress — meaning there will be some contentious races — six of the seven Senate toss-up states already were faced with an above-average "home energy burden" before the advent of the war in Iran and this year's data center boom, West noted.
At the same time, the EIA is projecting that PJM, the largest grid provider in the country, will see wholesale prices jump by 41% this year, while US pump prices on gasoline and diesel are sitting at or near all-time highs.
All of that has put affordability — and therefore energy and, by extension, the power behind the AI boom — front and center for midterm elections less than one month away.
Tech stocks were taking it on the chin on Wednesday as semiconductor stocks continued to sell off.
A look at Yahoo Finance's AlphaSpace chart shows a sea of red, with few outliers.
Apple (AAPL) shares bucked the trend, rising more than 1% while the rest of the tech sector slumped.
Stocks were mostly down midday after the release of hotter-than-expected September inflation data and mixed bank earnings.
The Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) fell more than 1%, and the S&P 500 (^GSPC) declined 0.8% as of 11:35 AM ET.
Go deeper with AlphaSpace 7,703.45 -102.00 (-1.31%) As of 2:59:37 PM EDT. Market Open. ^GSPC ^DJI ^IXIC Today at 3:19 PM UTC Anjali Robins Bond yields remain elevated following hotter-than-expected inflation data Bond yields remained elevated mid-morning following the earlier release of hotter-than-expected inflation data for September.
The 10-year Treasury yield (^TNX) was up 6 basis points at 5.27% at 11:18 AM ET. The 30-year Treasury yield (^TYX) was up 2 basis points at 5.58%.
Netflix (NFLX) stock lost early gains on Wednesday, following a Wall Street Journal report that the streaming giant was cutting roughly 6% of its workforce.
The cuts are expected to be in product, tech, legal, and Human Resources, according to an email from co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos, cited by Bloomberg.
On Tuesday, the streaming giant announced it had secured the exclusive rights in Spain and Andorra to the FIFA World Cup 203, bringing all 104 soccer matches live to Netflix.
Netflix stock has lagged this year, tumbling 25% since the beginning of 2026. The company, which made a bid to purchase Warner Bros (WBD), withdrew the offer after Paramount's Skydance (SKYD) offered more money for the media giant.
The Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) and S&P 500 (^GSPC) declined after hotter-than-expected September inflation data.
Thge Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) rose 0.2% while tech stocks declined as the 10-year Treasury yield gained after prices increased 3.7% on an annualized basis in September, higher than the 3.6% expected by economists.
Go deeper with AlphaSpace 51,461.15 -208.95 (-0.40%) As of 2:59:37 PM EDT. Market Open. ^DJI ^IXIC ^GSPC Today at 12:31 PM UTC Consumer Price Index comes in hotter than expected for September September's Consumer Price Index (CPI) came in at 3.7% versus 3.6% expected by economists.
Month-over-month prices rose 0.6%, in line with expectations. Core CPI, which strips out food and energy costs, rose 2.6% as compared to estimates of 2.5%.
Economists anticipated that higher gas and energy prices would drive inflation higher in September. A hotter-than-expected inflation print could put an October Fed rate hike back in play, experts cautioned.
Roughly 78% of investors expect the Fed to hold rates steady at its upcoming meeting, according to CME FedWatch.
Bank of America said Wednesday that its third quarter profit fell 17% from a year earlier as $1.2 billion regulatory penalty and a slowdown in its Wall Street machine dented higher lending income.
Bank of America's (BAC) stock fell more than 3% in premarket trading.
The nation's second biggest bank reported Q3 net income of $6.93 billion, or $0.91 per share, compared with the $1.10 per share analysts expected. "Excluding the regulatory penalty, Bank of America said it earned $8.1 billion, or $1.08 per share, with adjusted earnings per share rising 4% from a year earlier.
Revenue rose 3% to $30 billion, compared with expectations of roughly $30.6 billion.
Yahoo Finance's Hamza Shaban writes in today's Morning Brief newsletter:
The Apple household just got a new lineup. On Tuesday, the company unveiled several new smart home devices, including the HomeView hub, the HomePod Mini 2, and Apple TV 4K.
The company's new releases are a clear pivot in its corporate strategy. Not only is it trying its hand at smart home products once again after its HomePod failure, but Apple and its accelerating hardware releases show new CEO John Ternus's ambitious strategy as a company meeting the AI era head-on.
Tim Cook was Mr. Services, growing that business massively. But Ternus is clearly saying, why not both?
Finally, it seems, Apple has figured out a new way to take its "walled garden" design philosophy — a closed, safe ecosystem that favors trust, its signature design language, and vetted partners — and apply it to the home, putting its customers literally inside it.
Economic data: MBA mortgage applications, week ended Oct. 9 (-4.2% prior); CPI, month-on-month, September (+0.6% expected, +0.4% prior); Core CPI, month-on-month, September (+0.2% expected, +0.3% prior); CPI, year-on-year, September (+3.6% expected, +3.4% prior); Core CPI, year-on-year, September (+2.5% expected, +2.4% prior); Real average weekly earnings, year-on-year, September (+0.4% prior); Real average hourly earnings, year-on-year, September (-0.3% prior); Fed releases Beige Book
Earnings calendar: ASML (ASML), Bank of America (BAC), Morgan Stanley (MS), BlackRock (BLK), The Progressive Corporation (PGR), Fastenal Company (FAST), State Street Corporation (STT)
Catch up on some top stories you might have missed overnight:
Boston Fed's Collins wants to raise rates again this year
'The baby boomers have arrived': How Americans over 75 got richer than other age groups
China's September exports blow past forecasts, imports accelerate
Gold held a two-day decline after a Federal Reserve official signaled one more interest-rate hike may be needed this year, but further tightening won't be necessary in 2027, improving sentiment toward the precious metal.
Bullion traded near $4,155 an ounce, after falling 0.8% in the previous two sessions. Oil rose as a flare-up in attacks in the Middle East threatened further energy disruptions that could weigh on inflation and make a case for higher borrowing costs. Brent crude was above $106 a barrel.
Fed New York President John Williams said he sees one more interest-rate hike as appropriate this year. US Treasury yields edged lower after his remarks, supporting gold, which typically does better in a lower rate environment as it doesn't pay interest.
