At 3:00 p.m. GMT, the Dow Jones index dropped 0.42%, the Nasdaq was down 0.28% and the S&P 500 was down 0.33%.

On Tuesday, the Dow Jones had nibbled 0.15% to 36,142.22 points, the Nasdaq index, with a strong technological composition, 0.76% to 15,973.85 points and the extended S&P 500 index 0.39%, to 4,700 , 90 points, had come close to his record.

"The markets hovered around their records" at the start of the session, noted Schwab analysts while stressing that concerns around inflation and its impact on consumption remained in people's minds.

Among the indicators, new housing starts continued to decline in October.

"Not really good news," said Briefing.com's Patrick O'Hare as real estate construction is slowed by supply shortages and high prices, despite continued strong demand.

Last month, 1.520 million houses and buildings began to be built in the country, down 0.7% from September, according to data from the Commerce Department.

But, on the positive side, building permits, a leading indicator of the real estate market, rebounded more than expected, showing an increase of 4%.

In terms of quarterly results, if distributors have done better than expected, such as the giant Walmart (+ 0.35%) and the DIY chain Home Depot (+ 1.20% after + 5.73% the day before) l Many people have sounded the alarm bells on price increases announced on Tuesday.

Target fell (-4.21%) despite good results announced before the opening.

The department store chain said the rise in costs was greater than what it was passing on to its retail prices.

The quarterly results of telecoms giant Cisco (-0.94%) and microprocessor maker Nvidia (-0.85%) were expected after the close.

Visa, a member of the Dow Jones, suffered the blow (-5.35%) after Amazon announced that it would stop accepting Visa credit card payments in the United Kingdom from January 19, 2022, due to high processing charged by Visa.

Tesla continued to advance (+ 0.70% to 1,062 dollars), after having recovered the colors the day before (+ 4.08%), despite the announcement of the sale of a new block of shares by the CEO Elon Musk, for $ 931 million.

This brings the value of the securities sold by the leader for a week to about $ 7.8 billion.

Rivian, IPO last week, suffered a very sharp drop (-9% to 156 dollars) after defying gravity (+ 15.16% Tuesday).

The electric vehicle manufacturer entered the inner circle of the 100 largest capitalizations in the world on Tuesday, ahead of Volkswagen.

The specialist in treadmills and connected bikes Peloton, which is going through a difficult phase at the end of the pandemic which had boosted its sales, dropped more than 5% after an increase of 15.50% while he announced a forthcoming increase in capital.

In the bond market, rates on 10-year Treasuries were stable at 1.63%.

© 2021 AFP