Wall St dips as Greece vote looms

Michael Pistillo, Jr. with Barclays monitors stock prices at the New York Stock Exchange. File photo / AP

Wall Street moved lower overnight as Greek lawmakers prepared to vote on a proposal that would secure the cash-strapped country its third international bailout.

In Athens, riot police and Greek anti-austerity protesters clashed in front of the nation's parliament. Lawmakers are due to vote soon on reforms needed to secure the new bailout plan.

In late afternoon trading in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.11 per cent, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 0.22 per cent, while the Nasdaq Composite Index shed 0.24 per cent.

"If you take how far we've come in the last three days, throw a riot on TV and toss in the fact that it appears that Greek parliament is still debating this package - that's enough to hit the market late in the afternoon on a quiet day," Michael Antonelli, an institutional equity sales trader and managing director at Robert W Baird & Co in Milwaukee, told Bloomberg.

US Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen told the House Financial Services Committee in Washington she expects policy makers to raise rates this year as economic growth improves.

"If the economy evolves as we expect, economic conditions likely would make it appropriate at some point this year to raise the federal funds rate target," Yellen said in her semi-annual testimony on Wednesday to the House of Representatives finance committee.

"The FOMC [Federal Open Market Committee] expects US GDP growth to strengthen over the remainder of this year and the unemployment rate to decline gradually," Yellen said. The Fed boss will repeat her testimony to the Senate banking committee tomorrow.

Yellen has repeatedly said in recent months, and again today, that the pace of increases will be gradual. The pace could be faster if the first increase is delayed too long, she said.

"The US economy requires something other than crisis-era rates," Terry Sandven, chief equity strategist at US Bank Wealth Management in Minneapolis, told Reuters. "The pace of the rate hike is more important than the timing of it as investors remain in pause mode with a modest downward basis."

Declines in shares of Chevron and those of DuPont, last 1.6 per cent and 0.8 per cent lower respectively, outweighed gains in shares of Johnson & Johnson and those of Apple, each up 0.8 per cent recently. Netflix and Intel are set to report results after the market closes.

Shares of Bank of America rose, last up 3.5 per cent, after it posted its best quarterly profit in nearly four years.

In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index ended the session with a 0.4 per cent advance from the previous close. Germany's DAX increased 0.2 per cent, while France's CAC 40 added 0.3 per cent. The UK's FTSE 100 Index closed unchanged from the previous day.

"The resilience of the market in the past month is a very positive signal," Nadege Dufosse, asset allocation strategist at Candriam Investors Group in Luxembourg, told Bloomberg. "It shows that Europe's mechanisms to prevent contagion are credible, and that beyond the political stress over Greece, fundamentals are solid."