5 things to know before the stock market opens Tuesday, August 6

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

The market sell-off continued on Monday amid concerns over the state of the U.S. economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.6% to close the session at 38,703.27, while the S&P 500 moved 3% lower to finish at 5,186.33. This marked the biggest losses for both indexes since September 2022. The Nasdaq Composite saw the biggest percentage loss, falling 3.43% to close at 16,200.08. In Japan, stocks also tumbled, as the Nikkei 225 plunged 12.4% to close at 31,458.42 — the worst day for the index since “Black Monday” in 1987. Other global markets were also hit, with Europe’s Stoxx 600 falling 2.2% and bitcoin declining 8% to almost $54,000. Follow live market updates.

As a global market sell-off ensued on Monday over recession fears, Chicago Federal Reserve President Austan Goolsbee said that the central bank would respond to economic weakness. “The Fed’s job is very straightforward: maximize employment, stabilize prices and maintain financial stability. That’s what we’re going to do,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “We’re forward-looking about it. So if the conditions collectively start coming in like that on the through line, there’s deterioration on any of those parts, we’re going to fix it.” The central bank official also signaled that interest rates may be too restrictive, saying the Fed “should not be tightening or restrictive in real terms” if the economy isn’t overheating. His remarks come as the central bank has held rates steady between 5.25% and 5.5% since July of last year.

Google broke antitrust laws, according to a federal judge. On Monday, Google lost an antitrust case over its search dominance, with a federal judge ruling that the tech company has illegally maintained a monopoly over search as well as text advertising. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta wrote in the decision. The case, filed in 2020, is the first brought forth by the federal government against a major tech company in decades. “No company — no matter how large or influential — is above the law,” Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote in a statement. “The Justice Department will continue to vigorously enforce our antitrust laws.”

One of the co-founders of OpenAI is leaving the Microsoft-backed company. In a post on X on Monday, co-founder John Schulman said he would leave OpenAI to join its rival Anthropic – an Amazon-backed artificial intelligence startup. Schulman has worked at OpenAI since graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016 with a Ph.D. in computer science. He stressed that his decision to leave is due to his desire to focus more on AI alignment, an area that he said OpenAI leaders have been “very committed” to investing in. Less than three months ago, the company disbanded a superalignment team that focused on long-term AI risks.

Elon Musk’s America PAC is being investigated by another state – this time, North Carolina. The North Carolina attorney general’s office told CNBC on Monday that it is examining the committee after the state election board received a complaint about its collection of personal data without helping users register to vote, as it had promised. The North Carolina Board of Elections later told CNBC that it’s investigating the PAC. “North Carolina law makes it a crime for someone to fail to submit a voter’s registration form if that person has told a voter that they would be submitting the voter’s registration form,” the board’s spokesman, Patrick Gannon, told CNBC. The announcement comes one day after Michigan’s secretary of state’s office said it had opened an investigation into America PAC over voter data collection.

— CNBC’s Hakyung Kim, John Melloy, Sarah Min, Jeff Cox, Rohan Goswami, Jennifer Elias, Jordan Novet and Brian Schwartz contributed to this report.

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