August Recovery Is Suddenly a Memory for Wall Street

Stocks posted their worst day since last month’s mini-meltdown, with the S&P 500 falling more than 2% as growth and monetary anxieties likely combined to torch risky assets. Just as in the August episode, tech got hit the hardest with Nvidia driving a plunge in chipmakers. And the parallels don’t stop there. The yen jumped, a closely watched manufacturing gauge missed forecasts and oil plummeted on concern about tepid global demand. Wall Street’s “fear gauge” soared and Treasury yields tumbled. Still, the US Federal Reserve’s rate cut is (probably) almost here, and we all know what happened last month after the dust settled. Here’s your markets wrap.

Speaking of Nvidia, the US Department of Justice sent subpoenas to the company and others as it seeks evidence the chipmaker violated antitrust laws, an escalation of its investigation into the dominant artificial intelligence computing provider. Antitrust officials are said to be concerned that Nvidia is making it harder to switch to other suppliers and penalizes buyers that don’t exclusively use its AI chips.