Markets end higher, marking second straight winning week

A late- afternoon turnaround on Wall Street left stocks higher Friday as the market shook off a weak start amid worries about banks on both sides of the Atlantic.

The S& P 500 rose 0.6% after slipping for most of the morning. The benchmark index marked its second straight weekly gain. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.4%, while the Nasdaq composite ended 0.3% higher.

The upbeat close to the week came as markets have been turbulent on worries that banks are weakening under the pressure of much higher interest rates.

That has led to rising concerns about a possible recession and heavy uncertainty about what the Federal Reserve and other central banks will do with interest rates going forward.

“There are concerns out there about, obviously, a more severe bank crisis, both domestically and in Europe, and yet somehow markets are looking past that,” said Randy Frederick, managing director of trading & derivatives at Charles Schwab.

On Friday, much of the focus was on Deutsche Bank, whose stock tumbled 8.5% in Germany. This month shares of and faith in Swiss bank Credit Suisse fell so much that regulators brokered a takeover of it by rival UBS.

Credit Suisse faced a relatively unique set of longstanding troubles.

But the second- and third-largest U.S. bank failures in history this month have cast a harsher spotlight across the entire banking industry.

Other big European banks also fell Friday, including a 5.5% drop for Germany’s Commerzbank, a 5.3% fall for France’s BNP Paribas and a 3.5% loss for UBS.

Bank stocks ended mixed on Wall Street. Jpmorgan Chase fell 1.5%, while Bank of America rose 0.6%.

In the United States, the hunt by investors primarily has been for banks that could face a debilitating exodus of customers, similar to what helped cause the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

Investors have zeroedin on smaller and midsize banks, the ones below in size of the “too big to fail” banks and seen as greater risks.

First Republic Bank closed 1.4% lower. It’s down 90% for the year.