(News Bulletin 247) – Wall Street amplifies its lead on Friday following the publication of employment figures which reassure on the health of the economy without reinforcing fears of a tightening of monetary policy.

At the end of the morning, the Dow Jones thus won 1.3% to 33,568.7 points, while the Nasdaq Composite granted itself an increase of 1.8% to 12,178.1 points.

The Labor Department announced this morning that the US economy generated 253,000 jobs in April, a number well above expectations since the market was expecting around 160,000 new jobs.

This figure shows that the specter of recession is receding in the United States, without the Fed necessarily needing to raise its rates further after having taken them above the 5% threshold this week.

Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Fed, acknowledged this week that the recent setbacks in the banking sector were likely to weigh on activity by slowing the granting of loans to businesses.

“Over the next few months, the Fed will want to see to what extent a tightening of credit conditions slows the economy and is therefore not likely to raise interest rates further”, judge the economists of Commerzbank.

Main negative point of the monthly employment report, the average hourly wage continues to rise, a development that does not bode well for inflation which remains the main concern of the Federal Reserve

According to the CME Group’s FedWatch barometer, specialists in Treasuries saw a small increase in the probability of another rate hike in June.

The impact on the bond compartment is clearly negative with a yield on ten-year Treasuries rising above 3.44%.

At the sector level, ten of the 11 major S&P indices were in the green at the end of the morning, with the best performance going to that of technology (+2.2%) while ‘utilities’ (collective services) signed the only drop of the day.

As for values, Apple climbed 4.7% after exceeding expectations at the end of its past quarter thanks to particularly solid iPhone sales.

AMD is up more than 2% on press reports suggesting a collaboration project with Microsoft in artificial intelligence (AI) processing processors intended to compete with Nvidia’s graphics processors (GPUs).

Lyft is down 20% after announcing better-than-expected quarterly results, but unveiling forecasts deemed disappointing. The title has lost nearly 90% of its value since its IPO four years ago.

Over the week as a whole, the Dow has so far lost almost 1.6% and the Nasdaq has lost 0.6%.

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