The trading day finished poorly on Tuesday as the major stock indexes have all registered mild downfalls.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 86 points (0.5%) to 17,513, as Standard & Poor’s 500 (0.4%) and the NASDAQ Composite Index (0.4%) also registered downfalls by 4 p.m. EDT.

The indexes registered most of the slip just after Dennis Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, spoke favorably of the possibility of federal interest rates being raised for the first time since before the economic recession. This is highly anticipated and was foreshadowed by the Federal Reserve many times since the beginning of the year, against a flurry of protests from investors who claim that this might hinder the country’s economic recovery.

There has been no set date for the hike in the federal interest rate, with most analysts predicting it to happen either in September or late in the year. The government’s employment report for July, which is set to be released on Friday, could be a vital factor in the announcement; with this year generally seeing jobs being added at pre-recession rates and the active workforce being at a nearly four decades high level.

The Dow plummet was also influenced by tech giant Apple, whose stock prices fell by 3.2 per cent amidst concerns that a Chinese economic slowdown would tamper with the company’s largest growth market. Apple’s shares finished at $114.64 in regular trading, almost $20 less than its April 28 record of $134.54, wiping out more than $113 billion in value. However, it still remains the S&P’s 500 most valuable company by market capitalization, being estimated at $657.6 billion.

However, China’s situation was slightly better on Tuesday as the Shanghai Composite Index closed 3.7 per cent higher. This is attributed to the harsher legislation against short selling introduced by the country’s government on Monday, preventing investor from trading around borrowed shares as usual.

Greece on the other hand is nowhere close to getting out of its economic woes, as the main stock index in Athens was down 4.5 per cent during early hours trade. Adding to the woes, the traditional benchmark Athex Composite opened on Tuesday for the first time in over month – and slumped by 16 per cent until the end of the day, which represents the biggest percentage dip it suffered in the last 24 years.

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NASDAQ OMX Group Inc has given its consent to offer a startup the core technology in order to power a marketplace for bitcoin trading and the associated digital-currency assets, according to the reports.

NASDAQ’s X-stream trading system, which is used by over 30 exchanges as well as marketplaces globally, will be used by the New York-based startup Noble Markets.

According to the reports, NASDAQ will be providing marketing assistance.

Noble will adopt the same software that is being used by securities exchanges worldwide and a related system that runs the NASDAQ Stock Market. Spokesmanpokesman Ryan Wells said that NASDAQ is open towards providing its sevices for bitcoin trading, which it views

The development follows the January agreement by the New York Stock Exchange to carry out investment in Coinbase, another major trading platform for the digital currency.

Coinbase, a Bitcoin payments processor which is supported by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), started a regulated exchange in the US earlier this year for smooth trading of the virtual currency.

“It is a vote of confidence in bitcoin the technology. Now that you are seeing big organizations providing technology, there’s a feeling that bitcoin is here to stay,” said Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at Convergex Group.

The virtual currency bitcoins were launched in 2009. It allows people to carry out transactions purely over the Internet. The virtual currency came under scrutiny by the regulators both in the US and Europe after it reported a series of high-profile scandals, including the bankruptcy of bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, based in Tokyo.

In other news, the NASDAQ Composite Index has reached an all-time record on Friday following the recent surge in stocks that major tech companies are experiencing. As Google added more $60 billion in market capitalization on Friday after a 16 per cent surge in stocks, the Index went up by 64 points to 5.163, surpassing the previous June 23 record.

The continous surge in tech stocks has raised fears since the beginning of the year that this might represent a bubble similar to the one posted before the dotcom crash of 1999-2000, when the NASDAQ Composite Index abruptly fell to half its value as internet-based start-ups which had seen massive investment started to crumble. However, skeptics are dismissing the possibility due to the fact that the tech sector is nowadays spearheaded by solid companies with high revenue and profit numbers and proven sustainability.

A recently released U.S. Commerce Department report shows that housing starts in June rose by 26.6 percent compared to 2014. A 30% increase was also noted in permits offered for the construction of new homes.

This brings both housing starts and permits to their highest levels since before the 2008 financial crisis. Most of the increase was prompted by a large amount of multi-family homes which had their groundbreakings during the month, bringing the total housing starts at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of more than 1.1 million during June. Single-family housing starts instead showed a slight decline when compared to May.

Over 1.3 million building permits were issued during June, which represented the highest amount since July 2007. In comparison, the number of housing permits issued during June 2014 barely rose over the 1 million mark. Permits have also gone up by 7.4 percent on a month-by-month analysis since May; again, most of these were issued towards multiple-family building projects.

Despite the surge of new multi-family housing project, builders still have a lot of confidence regarding the prospects of new single-family houses. The Wells Fargo Housing Market Index indicates that builder confidence into the latter rose to 60 at the start of July, meaning that most builders rate market conditions as good rather than poor. This is the highest level attained in the past 10 years.

Analysts point out the fact that the readings come as predicted when taking into account the increase in sales overall in home markets, as well as the continuous rise in new jobs during 2015. The spike in multi-family housing came because of a continuous decrease in single-family housing sustainability during the recession, with many previous owners needing to become renters.

This makes the single home ownership rate plummet to its lowest in the last two decades, with only 63.7 percent of owner having complete ownership over their homes. First-time home buying is also hitting low points, making up a lesser share of the housing market.

Despite the fact that overall housing rates are reaching pre-recession numbers in some areas, analysts point that single-family housing still needs to rise by about 40 percent, while new housing available for sale currently stand at 4.5 month supply, lower than the recommended 6-month supply, questioning sustainability in the near future and offering slight hints at a possible housing shortage.

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