Wall Street ended a relatively calm session with a moderate loss Tuesday as investors, while happy with the government's plans to spend up to $250 billion to buy stock in private banks, decided to cash in profits from the previous day's massive advance as they refocused their attention on the economy.
It was the first time in nine sessions that the Dow Jones industrial average didn't close with triple-digit losses or gains although it did swing in a 700-point range. The Dow closed down 76 points a day after its record 936-point jump.
Big advances by many bank stocks helped offset some of the declines in the Dow and the Standard & Poor's 500 index, giving them a better showing for the day than the Nasdaq composite index, which fell more than 3 percent. The technology-dominated Nasdaq also lagged ahead of a profit report from Intel Corp., as investors were reminded of the troubled economy and its impact on corporate earnings.
Profit-taking set in after the Dow surged more than 400 points at the opening. Wall Street is expected to see jittery trading in the weeks and perhaps months ahead because of worries about the economy; stocks also tend to ratchet up and down when they're recovering from a plunge like the one Wall Street has suffered in the past two weeks.
"We don't know if the bottom is in," said Lincoln Anderson, chief investment officer and chief economist at LPL Financial, referring to the market's advance Monday after huge losses last week. "We certainly expect heightened volatility for a fair amount of time while we sort out just exactly what's going on."
Investors had snapped up stocks Monday in anticipation of the government's plan. President Bush said Tuesday the government would use a portion of the $700 billion financial bailout passed at the start of the month to inject capital into the nation's major banks, which have been slammed by souring mortgage investments. The move follows a similar one announced Monday by European governments to invest about $2 trillion in their own troubled banks.
The revised bailout plan differs from the original in that it aims to recapitalize banks, not just buy the troubled assets off their books at prices that could leave the banks with losses.
"This begins to penetrate the core of the problem," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at New York-based brokerage house Avalon Partners Inc.
Robert Dye, senior economist at PNC Financial Services Group, said the government's actions likely will help revive the credit markets, but now that the plan is place, investors are shifting back to concerns about the economy.
"These steps are not going to turn the real economy on a dime," he said of the government intervention. "The two keys to the fundamental economy right now are the job market and the housing market and both of those remain distressed."
"There isn't one bottom here. We're talking about multiple events. There will be a bottom in financial market and another in the labor market and one in the housing market. And they're not going to all line up," Dye said.
The Dow fell 76.62, or 0.82 percent, to 9,310.99.
Broader stock indicators also declined. The S&P 500 index fell 5.34, or 0.53 percent, to 998.01, and the Nasdaq fell 65.24, or 3.54 percent, to 1,779.01.
The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies, including many tech concerns, fell 16.24, or 2.84 percent, to 554.65.
Though the major indexes showed losses, advancing issues outnumbered decliners by about 9 to 7 on the New York Stock Exchange, where consolidated volume came to 7.97 billion shares, compared with 7.1 billion shares traded Monday.
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