It wasn’t what stock market bulls were hoping for.

Stocks tumbled on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve, citing the strength of the economy, signaled that it planned to keep raising interest rates and shrinking the extraordinary amount of support it has provided to financial markets in the decade since the financial crisis.

The S&P 500 stock index finished 1.5 percent lower, bringing its losses for the month so far to 9.2 percent. The benchmark had been higher ahead of the Fed’s 2 p.m. announcement about interest rates and a news conference that followed.

The central bank raised its benchmark interest rate another quarter percentage point.

That increase had been widely predicted. But in the financial markets, hopes had been high that the Fed would simultaneously signal its growing concern about the outlook for economic growth.

Such an outlook is known as “dovish” in financial market jargon. And there had been broad consensus among stock market analysts that the Fed would announce a “dovish hike” — that is, an increase paired with language that indicated it would slow the pace of tightening substantially — on Wednesday.