On Friday, shares in Amazon dropped by more than 8%, despite the e-commerce giant reporting sales growth of 10% in the most recent quarter.
The firm would be hit hard by any downturn in the US economy and also ran into investor scepticism about heavy AI spending.
Intel shares also plunged more than 25%, after the chipmaker warned it would need to take drastic action to restore growth, including cutting more than 15,000 jobs.
The stock market turmoil has emerged in the middle of a heated US presidential campaign, which has raised the stakes for the Fed and opened its moves up to intense political debate.
Republicans have suggested that lowering rates would amount to helping Democrats, with the party’s presidential candidate Donald Trump saying a pre-election rate cut is “something that they know they shouldn’t be doing”.
But Fed officials have consistently argued that politics do not bear on their decisions over rates.
In a statement following the jobs figures, President Joe Biden said the economy was still making progress.
The US economy expanded at an annual rate of 2.8% this spring, bouncing back after a slump at the start of the year.
Last month’s uptick in the unemployment rate also appeared driven by a rise in people looking for work, rather than a sudden surge in job losses, analysts said.
Nancy Vanden Houten, lead US economist at Oxford Economics, said she thought the report was “overstating emerging weakness”.
“We aren’t dismissing the entire upward creep in the unemployment rate, but the economy is not in recession,” she said.
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