Powell's Testimony on the Future of Futures by Investing.com

Investing.com – US futures fell on Wednesday as investors waited for indications of possible rate cuts by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

Powell will appear before Congress on Wednesday and Thursday and will likely be questioned about the direction of monetary policy in the face of growing signs of economic strains stemming from various trade disputes taking place in the United States. The stronger-than-expected jobs report last week helped to test expectations of policy easing from Powell's earlier comments.

The probability of a quarter-point rate cut at the Fed meeting at the end of July is close to 100%, but the implied probability of three cuts by the end of the year fell below 50%.

lost 30 points or 0.4% at 6:40 am ET (10:40 GMT), slipping 80 points or 0.3% and falling 9 points or 0.3%.

Tesla (NASDAQ 🙂 gained 0.5% after Bloomberg announced that the company was preparing to increase production, citing internal emails.

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ 🙂 fell 1.2% in the face of lingering concerns over the $ 2.6 billion bid price on Acacia Communications, which was announced on Tuesday.

Elsewhere, Amazon (NASDAQ 🙂 and Microsoft (NASDAQ 🙂 fell 0.3% from a key bid audience to create the US Army's first "cloud warfare" system .

Semiconductor companies fell slightly, with Intel (NASDAQ 🙂 down 0.8% and Micron (NASDAQ 🙂 down 0.2%.

On the data front, wholesale trade figures for May are released at 10:00 am Eastern Time (14:00 GMT).

In the commodities sector, it jumped 2.4% to a one-week high of $ 59.22 a barrel, while it fell by 0.2% to 1,397. , $ 45 troy ounce. The, which measures the greenback versus a basket of six major currencies, fell 0.1% to 97.037.