WALL Street stocks tumbled on Thursday as hawkish comments from the head of the Federal Reserve exacerbated worries over higher interest rates, offsetting strong corporate earnings. Stocks opened higher following good results from Tesla and upbeat comments from leading airlines. But the markets reversed course at mid-session, and ended decisively lower as the yield on the 10-year US Treasury note rose above 2.9 per cent. Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who has signaled the US central bank will have to move more aggressively to counter record US inflation, explicitly said a half-point interest rate increase is “on the table” for next month’s policy meeting. The comments followed remarks from a top European Central Bank that opened the door to faster interest rate hikes. “Today, you can basically say that for stocks and bonds, it’s all about the ECB and the Fed,” said LBBW’s Karl Haeling. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished down 1.1 per cent at 34,792.76. The broad-based S&P 500 dropped 1.5 per cent to end at 4,393.66, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index fell 2.1 per cent to 13,174.65. Tesla rose 3.2 per cent as it reported a record US$3.3 billion quarterly profit and projected another strong year of production growth in 2022 despite lingering supply chain woes. Twitter rose 0.7 per cent after Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced he had lined up enough financing to acquire the social media company and said he was weighing a tender offer directly to shareholders. United Airlines jumped 9.3 per cent and American Airlines rose 3.8 per cent after the companies offered bullish second-quarter outlooks amid the return in travel demand. But Disney dropped 2.4 per cent after Florida’s legislature scrapped the self-governing status of its Orlando theme park in a move widely seen as retaliation in a bitter row in the state over what has become known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law. AFP