Wall Street closes higher | The Press

(New York) The New York Stock Exchange ended higher on Friday, inspired by a series of good macroeconomic indicators and reassured by new comments from a member of the American central bank (Fed) on its next rate hike.

The Dow Jones gained 2.15%, to 31,288.26 points, the NASDAQ index, 1.79%, to 11,452.42 points, and the broader S&P 500 index, 1.92%, to 3863, 16 dots.

For once, as Wall Street convinces itself a little more each week that the economy is slowing down and risks recession, the day’s indicators were almost all positive from the point of view of investors.

Retail sales rose 1.0% in June, better than the 0.8% expected, although most of this increase was due to inflation.

In other good news, the recovery of the manufacturing activity index in the New York area, which returned to growth in July, after two months of contraction, according to the monthly Empire State index, while economists expected a new setback.

Better, the New York market has received some encouraging news from inflation, which has been worrying it so much for months. In June, import prices rose only 0.2% over one month, the weakest pace since December, against 0.7% expected. Since the United States is the world’s largest importer, import prices have a major influence on the evolution of inflation.

In addition to this indicator, Wall Street welcomed the results of the monthly survey on consumer sentiment, conducted by the University of Michigan. On average, the people questioned in July anticipate less inflation in one year (5.2% against 5.3%) and above all only 2.8% within 5 years, against 3.1% in June.

The June figures, which exceeded expectations, had contributed to the Fed deciding on a surprise hike of 0.75 percentage point in its key rate, rather than the expected half-point.

“So the fact that it’s coming back down is an encouraging sign for inflation projections and expectations for Fed rate hikes,” commented Nick Reece of Merk Investments.

While operators were betting 80% on Wednesday on an increase of one percentage point at the end of the next Fed meeting on July 26 and 27, a large majority on Friday preferred the scenario of a rise of 0, 75 points only.

Also on Friday, the president of the Atlanta branch of the Fed, Raphael Bostic, pleaded for the institution not to raise its rates “too dramatically”.

His remarks were in line with those of Governor Christopher Waller and the president of the antenna of St. Louis, James Bullard, who had also said they were in favor of an increase of three-quarters of a point.

On the stock exchange, the Citigroup bank surprised favorably (+ 13.23% to 49.98 dollars), unlike its major competitors who published this week, with a turnover and a profit higher than expectations, embellished through market activities and business services.

Despite a turnover in sharp decline and below expectations, Wells Fargo was also sought after (+6.17% to 41.13 dollars), this poor result being mainly due to the accounting effect.

The other banks have also engulfed themselves in the wake of Citi, such as Bank of America (+7.04% to 32.25 dollars).

Another ray of sunshine, the health insurer UnitedHealth (+5.44% to 529.75 dollars). The stock that weighs the heaviest in the Dow Jones has posted better than expected results, thanks in part to lower health care costs related to COVID-19 as well as the growth of its portfolio of insured persons.

Pinterest jumped (+16.17% to 20.40 dollars) after the Wall Street Journal reported that the investment company Elliott Management had taken a stake of more than 9% in the capital of the social network, according to the Wall StreetJournal.

The information benefited many other growth stocks, from Netflix (+8.20%) to Roblox (+6.08%), via PayPal (+6.27%).

The Wall Street Journal also reported that executives of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (-1.27% to $102.44) had been summoned as part of an investigation into a massive data breach.