Commodities and financials drag down others with them
new york — Stocks fell Tuesday, led by financial and commodity shares, after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urged banks to forgive more late loans and oil, gold and copper prices dropped from records.
Shares pared declines in the last hour of trading after CNBC said a deal to bail out bond insurer Ambac Financial Group Inc. is progressing. Citigroup Inc. tumbled to a nine-year low and helped drag financial shares down for a fourth day after analysts slashed earnings estimates. ConocoPhillips and Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. led a retreat in energy and mining shares, the best-performing industries of the last year.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index slid 4.59 to 1,326.75. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 45.1 to 12,213.8. The Nasdaq composite index added 1.68 to 2,260.28.
Citigroup fell 99 cents to $22.10. Merrill Lynch & Co.’s Guy Moszkowski said he expects $18 billion of credit writedowns related to the company’s holdings of subprime mortgages, collateralized debt, leveraged loans, consumer debt, real estate loans and other investments. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. cut its first-quarter estimate for Citigroup to a loss of $1 a share from a projection of a 15-cent profit due to a "miscalculation in our model."
Goldman slipped $1.48 to $163.60. Bear Stearns Cos. lost 15 cents to $77.17. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. retreated 26 cents to $48.35. Morgan Stanley declined 23 cents to $41.35.
Bank of America Corp. dropped 40 cents to $38.78. Wachovia Corp. declined 93 cents to $29.48 free credit report.com. Merrill cut profit estimates for the banks.
Ambac jumped 78 cents to $10.72.
ConocoPhillips dropped $1.94 to $81.50. Lehman Brothers analyst Paul Cheng lowered his recommendation to "equal weight" from "overweight." Exxon Mobil Corp. dropped $1.06 to $86.69. Schlumberger Ltd., the world’s largest oilfield-services provider, lost $2.43 to $84.55.
Freeport-McMoRan, the largest publicly traded copper company, tumbled $4.52 to $98.93. Newmont Mining Corp., the world’s second-largest gold producer, dropped $2.18 to $50.20 after gold prices fell.
Monsanto Co. dropped $6.91 to $111.72. Corn tumbled the most in almost six weeks on speculation that overseas demand and U.S. animal-feed consumption will slow after grain prices reached a record Monday.
Staples Inc. dropped 27 cents to $22.22.
Intel Corp. lost 1 cent to $20 after earlier falling as much as 57 cents. The company said gross margin will be 54 percent, down from the 56 percent it predicted in January. Cisco slipped 11 cents to $24.29 after earlier falling as much as 2.7 percent.
Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc. rallied $3.80 to $49.47 for the top gain in the S&P 500. A U.S. judge invalidated a patent on Bayer AG’s Yasmin contraceptive, so Barr may be able to sell a generic version before Bayer’s patent expires in 2020.