US stock market went decline down on Friday. The big stock market numbers didn’t do so well: the S&P 500 dropped 0.9%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average went down 0.5%, and the Nasdaq Composite, which mainly has tech companies, fell by 1.4%.
This happened because China said its economy got stronger last month, which made people worry less about it being the second-largest economy in the world. At the same time in the US, the United Auto Workers union started a big strike at some car factories.
On Thursday, the stock market did really well because people were happy about how much stuff people bought in stores and how prices for things went up in August. This made some folks think the people in the US are strong shoppers and prices keep going up, so maybe the people in charge of money (the Fed) will make interest rates go up more. The Fed is going to talk about this next week, and almost everyone thinks they’ll keep interest rates the same.
On Friday, a survey showed that people expect prices to not go up so fast in the short term, which is good news for the Fed.
Oil prices going up a lot lately is making prices for everything go up too, and it’s affecting the stock market. On Friday, oil prices stopped going up so much, but they were still pretty high compared to earlier this year.
People are still paying a lot of attention to a British company called Arm. They just started selling their stock to the public, and it went up by a lot on Thursday. On Friday, it went up a little bit more, but not as much.
