(News Bulletin 247) – The New York Stock Exchange opened higher on Thursday, driven by better than expected economic indicators and the good performance of the banking sector.
At the end of the morning, the Dow Jones rose 0.6% to 34,050.8 points, while the Nasdaq Composite is content with a more limited gain of 0.1% to 13,609.7 points.
Wall Street managed to register higher despite the sharp rise in bond yields, which are recovering against a backdrop of expectations of further rate hikes from the Fed.
GDP growth in the United States has indeed been revised to 2% for the first three months of the year, compared to 1.3% in the previous estimate, marking a much less significant slowdown compared to 2.6%. of the last quarter of 2022.
Another figure welcomed by the markets, registrations for unemployment benefits fell by 26,000 during the week of June 19, to 239,000 against 265,000 the previous week.
The data prompted a 12 basis point jump in the yield on 10-year government bonds to nearly 3.84%, a new high in a week.
Following these encouraging statistics, which confirm the solidity of the American economy, traders estimated on Thursday at 86.8% the probability of a rate hike of 25 basis points in July, against 74.4% there. a week old, according to CME Group’s FedWatch Barometer.
As has been the case for the past few sessions, the variations on Wall Street are hardly spectacular due to the wait-and-see attitude which prevails before the publication, tomorrow, of the ‘PCE’ price index, the preferred measure of inflation. from the Fed.
On the equity side, seven of the 11 major S&P sector indices are in the green, with financial stocks (+1.3%) posting the most marked increase.
The sub-fund was driven higher by the results of US bank stress tests, which were encouraging as they demonstrated that they had sufficient capital to weather any further turbulence in the banking sector.
“However, it is regrettable that only 23 banks out of the 4,136 American commercial banks took part in this stress test,” laments Christian Hantel, manager at Vontobel.
Goldman Sachs (+3.4%) and JPMorgan (+2.9%) thus sign the two largest increases in the Dow Jones index.
Among the other stocks in sight at the start of the session, Micron Technology dropped more than 3% after suffering heavy losses in the third quarter, which suggests that the group’s recovery will take time.
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