New York – U.S. stocks are rising amid a rush of optimism Friday after a report showed U.S. employers went on a stronger spree of hiring last month.
The S&P 500 was 0.3% higher in morning trading after paring a bigger gain from the open of trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 118 points, or 0.3%, as of 10:15 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.4% higher.
Banks, cruise-ship operators and other companies whose profits tend to benefit the most from a stronger economy led the way. Norwegian Cruise Line steamed 5.6% higher, JPMorgan Chase rose 1.9% and the small companies in the Russell 2000 index gained 1.1%. Dips for some market heavyweights kept indexes in check, though, including a 0.4% slip for Apple.
Stock indexes are clawing back some of their losses from earlier in the week, caused by worries that worsening tensions in the Middle East could lead to disruptions in the global flow of oil. Crude prices ticked higher again on Friday, but the moves were more modest than earlier in the week, as the world continues its wait to see how Israel will respond to Iran’s missile attack from Tuesday.
In the meantime, the strength of the U.S. economy reclaimed its spot as the top mover of markets.
Treasury yields jumped in the bond market after the U.S. government said employers added 254,000 more jobs to their payrolls last month than they cut. That was an acceleration from August’s hiring pace of 159,000 and blew past economists’ forecasts.
It was a “grand slam” of a report, according to Lindsay Rosner, head of multi-sector investing within Goldman Sachs Asset Management. She said policy makers at the Federal Reserve, who have been trying to pull off the difficult feat of keeping the economy humming while getting inflation under control, “must be smiling.”
Friday’s report capped a week of mostly encouraging data on the job market, including an update indicating layoffs remain relatively low. Such strength helps allay one of Wall Street’s top questions: whether the job market will continue to hold up after the Federal Reserve earlier kept interest rates at a two-decade high.
Before Friday’s jobs report, data had been showing the general trend was a slowdown in hiring by U.S. employers. That’s not surprising given that the Fed had been trying to press the brake hard enough on the economy to stamp out high inflation.
But Friday’s blowout numbers bolstered hope that the U.S. economy will indeed avoid a recession, particularly now that the Federal Reserve has made a drastic switch in policy and begun cutting interest rates to give it more juice. The Fed last month lowered its main interest rate for the first time in more than four years and indicated more cuts will arrive through next year.
Friday’s jobs data was strong enough to push traders to downgrade their forecasts for how steeply the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates by at its next meeting in November. They’re now forecasting less than a 10% probability that the Fed will deliver another larger-than-usual cut of half a percentage point, according to data from CME Group. That’s down from the better-than-a-coin-flip’s chance they saw a week ago.
That in turn sent the yield on the two-year Treasury shooting up to 3.86% from 3.71% late Thursday. The 10-year yield, which takes future growth for the economy and inflation into more consideration than the two-year yield, rose to 3.95% from 3.85%.
Also Friday, some 45,000 dockworkers at East and Gulf coast ports are returning to work after their union reached a deal to suspend its three-day strike until Jan. 15 to provide time to negotiate a new contract. That helped calm worries that a lengthy strike could have pushed up on inflation and dragged on the economy.
Of course, the Federal Reserve still does not have an all-clear that it’s succeeded in bringing inflation down to its 2% target while keeping the economy growing.
“This report tells the Fed that they still need to be careful as a strong labor market along with sticky housing/shelter data shows that it won’t be easy to engineer meaningfully lower inflation from here in the nearer term,” according to Scott Wren, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
In the oil market, the price for a barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, rose 1.1% to $78.45 per barrel and is up more than 9% for the week. A barrel of benchmark U.S. crude rose 0.9% to $74.38, up from roughly $68 at the start of the week.
In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe following the strong jobs report from the world’s largest economy.
In Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng jumped 2.8% in its latest sharp swerve. It soared a bit more than 10% this week on excitement about a flurry of recent announcements from Beijing to prop up the world’s second-largest economy.
___
AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.
