Financial Markets                      01/30 09:46

   

   NEW YORK (AP) -- Financial markets are churning on Friday as investors try 
to figure out what President Donald Trump's new nominee to lead the Federal 
Reserve will mean for them.

   The early reactions have been uneasy and sometimes quick to change because 
of the uncertainty. U.S. stocks fell modestly, with the S&P 500 down 0.2%. The 
Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 111 points, or 0.2%, as of 10:15 a.m. 
Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.2% lower.

   The value of the U.S. dollar, meanwhile, initially sank against other 
currencies following Trump's announcement before bouncing back.

   The value of the U.S. dollar, meanwhile, swiveled up and down several times 
following Trump's announcement before climbing. And some of the wildest action 
was again in precious metals markets, where the price of gold went through more 
cycles of tumbling sharply and retracing some of its losses.

   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 
helps goose the economy but can also lead to higher inflation.

   A fear in financial markets, one that's pushed up gold's price and weakened 
the U.S. dollar's value, is that the Fed will lose some of its independence 
because of Trump. The longtime assumption has been that the Fed can operate 
separately from the rest of Washington so that it can make decisions that are 
painful in the short term, such as keeping interest rates high and grinding 
down on the economy, to fix a long-term problem, such as getting inflation back 
down to its goal of 2%.

   Trump's nominee, Kevin Warsh, used to be a governor on the Fed's board, so 
investors are familiar with him. That could also mean Warsh is familiar with 
and hopes to continue the institution of the Fed as an independent operator. 
But Warsh has also been critical of the Fed's current chair, Jerome Powell.

   "Indeed, Warsh is not the Fed's guy, he is Trump's guy, and has shadowed 
Trump on monetary policy almost every step of the way since 2009," according to 
Thierry Wizman, a strategist at Macquarie Group. "This doesn't necessarily mean 
that Warsh will push the Fed into rate cuts soon," but it could indicate he may 
be quicker to do so when the time comes.

   On Wall Street, stocks of metals miners tumbled as the price of gold sank 6% 
to $5,033.00 per ounce. Gold's momentum has suddenly run out following a 
tremendous rise where its price roughly doubled over 12 months. It topped 
$5,000 for the first time on Monday and got near $5,600 on Thursday.

   Silver, which has been on a similar, jaw-dropping tear, fell even more. It 
dropped nearly 14%.

   Prices for gold and other precious metals had been surging as investors 
looked for safer investments while weighing a wide range of risks, including a 
potentially less independent Fed, a U.S. stock market that critics say is 
expensive, political instability, threats of tariffs and heavy debt loads for 
governments worldwide.

   Friday's drops for metals prices helped send the stock of miner Newmont down 
5.8%. Freeport-McMoRan, another miner, dropped 5.8%.

   Helping to limit the market's losses were Tesla, which rose 3.5%, and 
Microsoft, which added 0.7%. They both bounced back after dropping on Thursday 
despite delivering better profit reports for the latest quarter than analysts 
expected.

   Apple swung from an early loss to inch up by 0.1% after the iPhone maker 
reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

   In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury held at 4.24%. That's 
where it was late Thursday, but in the overnight and early-morning hours, it 
climbed near 4.28% before falling back.

   A rise in a bond's yield indicate that its price is weakening. Yields may 
have felt some upward pressure from a report released Friday morning showing 
U.S. inflation at the wholesale level was hotter last month than economists 
expected. That in turn could put additional pressure on the Fed to keep 
interest rates steady for a while instead of continuing to cut them, as it did 
late last year.

   In stock markets abroad, indexes rose in much of Europe following a more 
mixed performance in Asia.

   Stocks rose 1.2% in Jakarta after the CEO of Indonesia's stock market, Imam 
Rachman, resigned Friday. Stocks there had stumbled in prior days after MSCI, 
an influential company in the investment industry that creates stock and other 
indexes, warned about market risks such as a lack of transparency.

   ___ AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.

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