While you were sleeping: US rates on hold

US Treasuries rose while Wall Street fluctuated, paring back earlier losses, after minutes from the July Federal Reserve meeting showed US policy makers might be in less of a rush to raise interest rates.

New York Fed President William Dudley says "it's possible" the central might hike rates as early as next month. However, the minutes from the July meeting seemed to pour cold water on the idea of a September rate hike.

"Several suggested the committee would likely have ample time to react if inflation rose more quickly than they currently anticipated, but they preferred to defer another increase until they were more confident inflation was moving closer to 2% on a sustained basis," according to the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee's meeting.

"However, some other participants viewed recent economic developments as indicating labour market conditions were at or close to those consistent with maximum employment and expected recent progress in reaching the committee's inflation objective will continue, even with further steps to gradually remove monetary policy accommodation," the minutes say.

Wall Street recovered. In 3.06pm trading in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average eked out a 0.02% gain. The Nasdaq Composite Index slipped 0.07%. In 2.50pm trading, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index inched 0.08% higher.

Bonds rose, pushing yields on the 10-year note two basis points lower to 1.55%, according to Bloomberg.

"These notes really show they're giving the same amount of ammunition to the hawks and the doves," Pennsylvania-based Penn Mutual Asset Management chief investment officer Mark Heppenstall says.

"We still have a lot of economic numbers to be released between now and December, so if I had to guess, I would say that the earliest we will see a hike will be early 2017."

In the Dow, gains in shares of Pfizer and those of DuPont, up 0.8 % each respectively, offset slides in shares of Cisco and those of Intel, down 1.2 % and 0.8 % respectively.

"I don't think anything in these minutes supports a quicker rate increase and again, I think they're data dependent still," Everbank World Markets president Chris Gaffney told Reuters.

Weighing on sentiment were disappointing results from Target, down 6.1% as of 3.16pm in New York, as well as from Lowe's, down 5.5%.

In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index ended the day with a 0.8% slide from the previous close. The UK's FTSE 100 index slid 0.5%, France's CAC 40 index retreated 1%, while Germany's DAX index fell 1.3%.

(BusinessDesk)