S&P 500 gains for day but posts weekly losses on trade war fears

NEW YORK — The S&P 500 ended another turbulent week on an upbeat note Friday, but major indexes posted their worst week of losses since early February as President Donald Trump’s threat to impose import tariffs on steel and aluminum rattled investors.

The gains on Friday came as investors who had been spooked by the prospect of a global trade war backed off those concerns and noted a trade war was far from certain at this point.

Mr. Trump on Thursday last week threatened a 25% tariff on steel imports and 10% on aluminum without exemptions for any country, igniting a selloff in a market already on edge over rising US interest rates and bond yields.

Mr. Trump struck a defiant tone on Friday, saying trade wars were “good and easy to win,” and US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, appearing on CNBC, said tariffs would have a “trivial effect.”

The tariffs could dampen profits for everything from car makers to beer companies and result in higher prices for consumers.

Shares of big US steel companies and manufacturers were under pressure on uncertainty over the effects of tariffs.

Shares in Caterpillar, a buyer of raw materials and a big exporter of construction machinery products, were down 2.6% after falling 2.8% in the previous day’s session. General Motors was down 1%.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 70.92 points or 0.29% to 24,538.06; the S&P 500 gained 13.58 points or 0.51% to 2,691.25; and the Nasdaq Composite added 77.31 points or 1.08% to 7,257.87.

For the week, the S& P 500 dropped 2%, while the Dow was down 3% and the Nasdaq fell 1%. Wall Street had posted gains in the previous two weeks as it recovered from its steep earlyFebruary sell-off.

Those losses in early February pushed the S&P 500 down more than 10% from a Jan. 26 record high, confirming the market was in a correction.

The tariffs are unlikely to significantly hurt Corporate America’s overall earnings, according to stock market strategists, who were not immediately adjusting their profit estimates following Trump’s announcement.

“The impact on total corporate earnings first would be driven by the impact on the economy,” said Keith Parker, US equity strategist for UBS in New York.

Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by 1.69 to one; on Nasdaq, a 2.99to-1 ratio favored advancers. The S&P 500 posted one new 52-week high and 25 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 59 new highs and 65 new lows. About 7.7 billion shares changed hands on US exchanges. That compares with the 8.4 billion daily average for the past 20 trading days, Thomson Reuters data show. —