NEW YORK—Stocks dropped Thursday following another mixed set of profit reports from companies, as rising expectations for interest rates keep up the pressure on Wall Street.
The S&P 500 fell 0.9 percent, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 249 points, or 0.7 percent, and the Nasdaq composite sank 1 percent. All three indexes had been up by close to 1 percent in the morning, before momentum gave out.
Stocks have been shaky this week, flipping from gains to losses and back again amid uncertainty about where interest rates and inflation are heading. A still-strong jobs market has investors buying more into the Federal Reserve’s forecast that it will hike rates a couple more times before holding them at a high level through this year. High rates can drive down inflation but also raise the risk of a recession and hurt investment prices….