Dec. 14 -- U.S. stock-index futures declined after a bigger-than-forecast increase in consumer prices reinforced concern that rising energy costs will dampen economic growth.
Home Depot Inc., International Business Machines Corp. and Intel Corp. led declines in Dow Jones Industrial Average companies. Amazon.com Inc., the world's biggest Internet bookstore, and EBay Inc., the largest online auctioneer, retreated after the ComScore Inc. said holiday online sales grew at the slowest pace ever.
Standard and Poor's 500 Index futures expiring in March declined 11.8 to 1,486.7 at 9:06 a.m. in New York. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures slid 83 to 13,515. Nasdaq-100 Index futures lost 14 to 2,100.
``The consumer is getting hit by higher energy prices and given the state of the overall housing market, we're expecting consumers to pull in their spending,'' said Rose Grant, who helps manage about $2 billion at Eastern Investment Advisors in Boston. ``We don't think consumer spending will be as strong as in past quarters.''
The consumer price index increased 0.8 percent in November, the most since September 2005, after a 0.3 percent gain in October, the Labor Department said. Prices excluding food and energy climbed 0.3 percent, also more than forecast.
Home Depot, the biggest home-improvement retailer, slipped 24 cents to $27.40. IBM lost 48 cents to $107.70. Intel, the biggest maker of computer processors, slumped 26 cents to $26.87.
Amazon, EBay
Amazon.com fell 97 cents to $91.43. EBay, the largest Internet auctioneer, dropped 28 cents to $33.81.
Internet sales from Nov. 1 through Dec. 11 increased 19 percent to $20.5 billion, Reston, Virginia-based ComScore said yesterday. Online sales in November and December may rise 20 percent, a record low for the industry, and slower than the 26 percent pace a year earlier.
U.S. retailers may report the worst sales growth since 2002 this year as higher fuel and food costs discourage spending during the holiday gift-giving season, the National Retail Federation said.
Citigroup Inc., the biggest U.S. bank, slipped 21 cents to $30.80. Moody's Investors Service lowered the bank's credit rating to Aa3, the fourth-highest level, from Aa2 late yesterday. Citigroup will probably ``take sizable writedowns'' for securities backed by home mortgages and collateralized debt obligations, Moody's said.
Citigroup said it will take over seven troubled investment funds and assume $58 billion of debt to avoid forced asset sales that would further erode confidence in capital markets.
Goldman's Bet
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. added $1.02 to $209.50. The world's biggest securities firm may post record full-year profit of more than $11 billion on Dec. 18, boosted by $4 billion from bets on subprime mortgage-related lending, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing analysts.
The gains by a few traders who speculated that subprime securities would lose value helped to compensate for $1.5 billion to $2 billion of losses elsewhere, the newspaper said. A Goldman spokesman declined to comment, according to the Journal.
Novell Inc. fell 60 cents to $6.50. The second-biggest seller of Linux operating-system software in the U.S. reported a fourth-quarter loss of 5 cents a share after the close of U.S. exchanges yesterday. Analysts, on average, had expected the company to earn 3 cents a share, according to a Bloomberg survey.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the risk of a recession is increasing and that economic growth is ``getting close to stall speed.'' He spoke in an interview with National Public Radio yesterday.
Economists in a Bloomberg survey had forecast the cost of living increased 0.6 percent in November. Prices excluding food and energy, known as the core rate, were forecast to rise 0.2 percent for a sixth consecutive month.
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