Apple, Facebook Stocks Tumble After Fed Chief’s Critique

Tech stocks fell Tues­day morn­ing after Fed­er­al Re­serve Chair Janet Yel­len said their com­pan­ies may be over­val­ued.

“Valu­ation met­rics in some sec­tors do ap­pear sub­stan­tially stretched — par­tic­u­larly those for smal­ler firms in the so­cial-me­dia and bi­o­tech­no­logy in­dus­tries,” Yel­len wrote in a semi­an­nu­al mon­et­ary re­port to Con­gress.

This “stretch” was ap­par­ent even “des­pite a not­able down­turn in equity prices for such firms early in the year,” she ad­ded.

Face­book, Twit­ter, Google, and Apple were all down between 0.4 and 1 per­cent on the day. The Dow Jones in­dus­tri­al av­er­age has been ba­sic­ally flat.

Any long-term ef­fect on the stocks re­mains to be seen. All four staged af­ter­noon ral­lies to erase some, but not all, of their morn­ing slides.