US Equity Markets Fall After FOMC Minutes Show Narrow Support for Rate Cut

04:21 PM EST, 12/30/2025 (MT Newswires) -- US equity indexes closed lower Tuesday after Federal Open Market Committee minutes showed that the decision to lower interest rates earlier this month was heavily contested.

* The Federal Reserve released minutes Tuesday from a meeting earlier this month showing that the vote to lower rates was closer than the final tally suggested. Several participants who supported the cut said the decision was finely balanced and that they would have also supported keeping the target range unchanged.

* The Institute for Supply Management Chicago PMI rose to 43.5 in December from 36.3 in November, exceeding the 39.8 estimate in a Bloomberg survey.

* The US Federal Housing Finance Agency said its seasonally adjusted monthly house price index increased 0.4% in October, rebounding from a downwardly revised 0.1% drop in September.

* February West Texas Intermediate crude oil fell $0.10 to settle at $57.98 per barrel, while February Brent crude, the global benchmark, was last seen down $0.06 at $61.88.

* Applied Digital (APLD) and Ekso Bionics (EKSO) on Monday entered into a nonbinding term sheet to combine Applied Digital's (APLD) cloud computing unit with Ekso to form a new accelerated-compute platform called ChronoScale. Ekso shares almost doubled on Tuesday, and Applied Digital (APLD) fell 2.9%.

* OceanFirst Financial (OCFC) on Monday agreed to acquire Flushing Financial (FFIC) in an all-stock deal valued at $579 million. OceanFirst shares fell 6.7% on Tuesday, while Flushing Financial (FFIC) dropped 8.9%.

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