Market Performance: March 15, 2024.

The S&P 500 fell on Friday and notched its second-straight weekly loss, with technology stocks under pressure as inflation concerns remain front and center ahead of the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting next week.

The broad market index lost 0.65% to close at 5,117.09. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 190.89 points, or 0.49%, to finish the session at 38,714.77, while the Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.96% to 15,973.17. The S&P 500 shed 0.13% this week. The 30-stock Dow inched lower by 0.02% on the week, and the Nasdaq slipped 0.7%.

Tech shares were broadly lower, with Amazon and Microsoft down more than 2% each. Shares of Apple and Google-parent Alphabet also fell. Chip giant Nvidia has whipsawed this week as traders worry about the stock’s valuation and book profits in the high-flying name; it ended the day slightly lower but was up about 0.4% for the week.

Grocery Sticker Shock May Alter Consumer Habits, Forcing Companies To Cut Prices

The economy is pretty healthy by many measures, but the view from the checkout aisle at the grocery store hasn’t been so rosy.

If you get a sense that you’re paying more to get the same food lately, economic data bears that out. Grocery prices rose 0.4% in January, the most in a year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. 1 And spending at grocery stores rose 0.6% in January from December, even as people pulled back their spending in other areas, the Census Bureau said Thursday in its monthly report on retail sales.

“Consumers are feeling that prices for everyday purchases are too high,” Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council at the White House said Thursday at a conference of the National Association for Business Economics in Washington.

She went on to highlight food company profit margins, repeating Biden’s recent attacks against corporate profits as a source of the high inflation that has battered household budgets since 2021. She noted that grocery prices rose after the pandemic disrupted supply chains, but that they’ve been slow to come back down after those supply chains were restored.

“Certainly people are fed up with high prices,” Brainard told reporters at the conference. “The prices of the things that they buy on a weekly basis, groceries in particular, are not back to normal. And I think they're choosing to shop in different ways … that should help to pressure some margins and grocery prices to come down.”

Experts offer tips on establishing financial security

We’re all looking for financial security and one of the best ways to establish that is to try and get control of your debt. With interest rates continuing to rise—it’s more important than ever in the coming months to improve your financial health in 2024. If you’re the government, you can just print up more money when you need it.

For the rest of us, when we run out of money—that’s it, and these days a lot of us are getting into deep debt. “We’ve got total household debt now, over $17.3 trillion as of the end of Q3, which is up four and a half percent from that from the last year,” said financial coach and CEO of Credit and Debt Jeff Mandel. That translates into an average of $102,000 of debt per household, with the average personal debt about $1,800 per person.

Much of that debt stems from credit cards and experts say that debt is rising due to the cost of repayments. “Interest rates are still at record highs for a lot of people,” said Mandel. Lending Tree says the average credit card interest rate is over 24%. If you don’t pay off your credit card balances in full, the interest you’re paying next month is almost interest on interest—it’s compounded. Although you can’t control previously accrued debt, you can find ways to control your current spending by creating financial goals.

“It starts with a budget,” said Mandel. “Look at what you make each month and what you need to spend on and then layer in what you want to spend on.”

When it comes to spending, there’s a big difference between needs and wants.

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