Wall Street closes lower on Fed rate hike bets

STORY: U.S. stocks ended lower on Wednesday, as the Dow dropped about 1%, the S&P 500 shed 1.2% and the Nasdaq slid about one-and-a-third percent. Kevin Warsh held his first press conference as Federal Reserve Chair on Wednesday after the central bank wrapped its June policy meeting. The Fed left interest rates unchanged, as expected, but new projections showed nine central bank officials expect at least one rate hike by the end of 2026. Warsh himself did not submit an interest-rate-path projection, noting that the central bank would scale back on offering forward guidance. Brian Mulberry is chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management."The market's just kind of digesting, I think, a lot of this right now, as we all probably need to sleep a couple of nights on this and figure out what's going to happen next. But I think what you're going to find out is that the Fed is just going to come back to providing stable monetary policy over a long period of time and stop trying to forecast so much what's going to happen month to month, meeting to meeting, and where interest rates should go is simply down to around 2.5 or 3.5%, stay there, so that inflation can be about 2 to 2.5% over a long period of time."::ArchiveMeanwhile, oil prices edged back up on Wednesday after President Donald Trump said the agreement with Tehran on the Iran war was not final and that the conflict could resume if he is unsatisfied.Among individual stock moves, CME Group slipped about 3.5% after the exchange operator said its CEO will step down on March 1 and transition to the role of executive chairman.And shares of Allbirds soared 39% after the footwear maker-turned-AI company changed its name to Smartbird and appointed former Amazon executive Nadia Carlsten as CEO.