US stock index futures remain unchanged at six week high

U.S. stock-index futures were little changed, indicating the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index will remain near a six-week high, as Federal Reserve policy makers prepared to begin a two-day policy meeting.

“With the FOMC convening for its two-day policy meeting, there’s now a broad acknowledgment that we’ll see the tapering of QE getting under way tomorrow and even if this does just look like a token move, it’s also a timely reminder that the era of cheap money is drawing to a close,” said analysts at Monex Capital Markets in a note for the Wall Street Journal.

Futures on the S&P 500 expiring in December slipped 0.1% to 1,688.7 at 10:21 a.m. in London. Contracts on the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 8 points, or less than 0.1%, to 15,423.

A Labor Department report at 8:30 a.m. in Washington may show consumer prices advanced 1.6% in August from a year earlier, slowing from 2% in July, according to a analysts. Costs probably increased 0.2% month-on-month, matching July’s increase. U.S. consumer-price gains have averaged 1.6% in 2013, falling from 2.1% in 2012. The figure was as high as 14.8% in 1980.

Ford, which got 21% of revenue from Europe last year, dropped 0.7% to $17.23. Car registrations in the region declined 4.9 to 686,957 vehicles in August from a year earlier, the Brussels-based European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association said today. Eight-month sales slid 5.2% to 8.14 million autos, the lowest since records began in 1990.
Mosaic Forecast

Mosaic tumbled 2.6% to $44.35 in German trading. Potash sales volumes in the third quarter will be 1.45 million to 1.65 million metric tons, down from a previous forecast on July 16 of 1.8 million to 2.1 million tons, Plymouth, Minnesota-based Mosaic said in a statement. Prices will be in the range of $330 to $340 per ton, compared with the $330 to $360 a ton originally forecast, according to the statement.

Software company Adobe Systems will report third-quarter results after the market closes Tuesday. Analysts in a FactSet survey forecast per-share earnings of 34 cents on revenue of $1.01 billion.