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NEW YORK -- Financial markets churned on Friday as investors tried to figure out what President Donald Trump's new nominee to lead the Federal Reserve will mean for interest rates.
U.S. stocks fell, with the S&P 500 down 0.4% after sinking as much as 1.1% earlier in the day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 179 points, or 0.4%, and the Nasdaq composite lost 0.9%.
The value of the U.S. dollar rallied, but only after swiveling a couple times following Trump's nomination of Kevin Warsh. And some of the wildest action was again in precious metals markets, where gold and silver prices plunged following their stellar runs over the last year.
Whoever leads the Fed has a big influence on the economy and markets worldwide by helping to dictate where the U.S. central bank moves interest rates. Such decisions lift or weigh on prices for all kinds of investments, as the Fed tries to keep the U.S. job market humming without letting inflation get out of control. Trump has been pushing for lower interest rates, which usually help goose the economy but can also cause higher inflation.
On Wall Street, stocks of metals miners tumbled as the price of gold dropped 11.4% to settle at $4,745.10 per ounce. Gold's price suddenly ran out of momentum following a tremendous rally where it roughly doubled over 12 months. It topped $5,000 for the first time on Monday and was around $5,600 at one point on Thursday.
Silver, which had been on a similar, jaw-dropping tear, fell even more. It plunged 31.4%.
Prices for gold and other precious metals had been surging as investors looked for safer places for their money while weighing a wide range of risks, including a potentially less independent Fed, a U.S. stock market that critics say is expensive, threats of tariffs and heavy debt loads for governments worldwide.
The dramatic halt may have been inevitable given how far and how fast metal prices had surged over the last year. Nothing goes up in price forever.
Friday's drops for metals prices helped send the stock of miner Newmont down 11.5%. Freeport-McMoRan, another miner, dropped 7.5%.
Helping to limit the market's losses was Tesla, which rose 3.3%. It bounced back after dropping on Thursday despite delivering better profit reports for the latest quarter than analysts expected.
Apple added 0.5% after the iPhone maker reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.
All told, the S&P 500 fell 29.98 points to 6,939.03. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 179.09 to 48,892.47, and the Nasdaq composite sank 223.30 to 23,461.82.
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury inched up to 4.25% from 4.24% late Thursday. It got near 4.28% in the overnight and early-morning hours before falling back. A rise in a bond's yield indicates that its price is weakening.
Yields may have felt some upward pressure from a report released Friday showing U.S. inflation at the wholesale level was hotter last month than economists expected. That could put pressure on the Fed to keep interest rates steady for a while instead of cutting them, as it did late last year.