US markets end higher on Thursday

09 Sep 2022 Evaluate

The US markets ended higher after moving between gains and losses on Thursday, extending their previous session gains, as traders digested comments from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who reiterated the central bank's commitment to aggressively fighting inflation. Powell also once again warned about the dangers of allowing elevated prices to become entrenched, noting the Fed has a responsibility to bring inflation back down to 2 percent. He said the longer inflation remains well above target, the greater the risk the public does begin to see higher inflation as the norm, and that has the capacity to raise the costs of getting inflation down. On the sectoral front, Biotechnology stocks turned in some of the market's best performances on the day, driving the NYSE Arca Biotechnology Index up by 3.4 percent.

Substantial strength was also visible among banking stocks, as reflected by the 2.8 percent surge by the KBW Bank Index. The index continued to rebound after ending Tuesday's trading at its lowest closing level in well over a month. On the economic data front, the Labor Department released a report unexpectedly showing a modest decrease in initial jobless claims in the week ended September 3rd. The report showed initial jobless claims edged down to 222,000, a decrease of 6,000 from the previous week's revised level of 228,000. Street had expected jobless claims to inch up to 240,000 from the 232,000 originally reported for the previous week. With the unexpected dip, jobless claims fell to their lowest level since hitting 202,000 in the week ended May 28th.

Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 193.24 points or 0.61 percent to 31,774.52, Nasdaq surged 70.23 points or 0.6 percent to 11,862.13 and S&P 500 was up by 26.31 points or 0.66 percent to 4,006.18.

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