After wild week, Dow rebounds above 24K
U.S. stock markets seesawed again Friday, capping a head-spinning week that wiped out as much as $3 trillion in U.S. stock market value as investors fled from equity funds.
The Dow Jones industrial average saw a more than 1,000-point swing, or about 4.2 percent, on Friday, in one of the market’s worst weeks since the 2009 financial crisis. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500stock index gave up early gains and slid into negative territory before clawing back into the black.
The Dow finished up 330.44 points, or 1.4 percent, at 24,190.90. The S&P 500 gained 38.55 points, or 1.5 percent, to close at 2,619.55. And the Nasdaq ended ahead, too, gaining 97.33 points, or 1.4 percent, to close at 6,874.49. Investors remained torn. The massive Trump tax cut should provide a huge stimulus to an economy already rushing ahead at full employment, boosting profits and growth. At the same time, fears are growing that interest rates will jump as the federal government borrows massive amounts to cover its growing deficits.
“There’s a lot boiling over i n this pot,” Edward Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, said. “The stock market clearly has concerns with what’s happening in the bond market and the bond market is becoming increasingly concerned with both monetary and fiscal policies.”
Investors, who set a monthly record for sinking money into equity funds in January, pulled their money out at a record pace in the week ended Feb. 7, according to EPFR, a Cambridge, Mass., data firm. Investment in inflation protected bonds rose.
Some analysts believed that the stock market swoon Specialist Jay Woods works the New York Stock Exchange floor as the chart behind him shows the day’s volatility. did not reflect deeper economic woes.
“This is a technical-driven sell-off, rather than one reflecting a significant deterioration in fundamentals,” Mohamed A. El-Erian, the chief economic adviser at German-based financial giant Allianz, said in an email. He added such sell-offs “are particularly unsettling to in- vestors because it is hard for them to point to a familiar culprit relating to economics, geo-politics or the corporate world.”
But El-Erian said that these corrections “tend not to contaminate the broader economy as long as fundamentals are strong, which is the case today. The global economy is growing in a synchronized fashion, corporate balance sheets are strong, and banks are well capitalized.”
In a speech Thursday night, Esther George, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said that “current conditions and the near-term outlook appear quite rosy.” But while “the nation remains far from a fiscal crisis,” she warned, “changes will be necessary to put government debt on a sustainable trajectory.”
Investors are worried about both fiscal and monetary policy. The Treasury Department last week quietly announced that the government is on track to borrow nearly $1 trillion this fiscal year — President Donald Trump’s first full year in charge of the budget. That’s almost double what the government borrowed in fiscal 2017.
At the same time, the Federal Reserve has said it expects to raise rates in three quarter-point incre- ments, a modest start to returning to historically normal rates after the long recovery from the Great Recession of 2009. Moreover, the Federal Reserve has indicated that it will slowly reduce the amount of Treasury bonds it holds, potentially raising interest rates further.
The concerns reverberated around the world. Global markets, especially in Asia, fell sharply Friday after U.S. stocks went into correction territory, dropping 1,000 points for the second time in a week.
In Europe, however, the reaction was more measured, with the main stock indexes posting losses of just more than 1 percent.
Big retail investment houses continued to urge calm. Fidelity noted that since 1920, the S&P 500 has suffered an average of three 5 percent corrections a year, a 10 percent correction once a year, and a 20 percent correction every three years.