Stan Choe
US stocks are rallying to the edge of their all-time high after easing oil prices helped calm Wall Street’s worries that inflation could get even worse.
The S&P 500 jumped 1.5 per cent and is just 0.1 per cent below its record set earlier this summer. It’s coming off a wild July, where it swung up and down as oil prices shot higher because of the war with Iran and other worries. The Dow Jones was up 649 points, or 1.2 per cent, as of 2:30 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 2.2 per cent higher.
The Australian sharemarket is set to edge lower, with futures pointing to a loss of 2 points at the open. The ASX jumped 0.5 per cent on Monday after President Donald Trump said over the weekend that he decided to hold off on new strikes against Iran at the urging of allies in the region.
US stocks got a lift to kick off their trading week as the price for a barrel of Brent crude sank 5 per cent to $US83.52. Brent’s price careened between $US72 and $US102 last month as worries rose and fell about when the war with Iran would allow oil tankers to freely exit the Persian Gulf again to deliver crude to customers worldwide. The latest acquiescence by Trump helped to ease worries about the global flow of crude, and Treasury yields correspondingly fell in the bond market.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury sank to 4.68 per cent from 4.75 per cent late on Friday. It, though, remains well above its 3.97 per cent level from before the war with Iran.
Higher yields threaten to undercut prices for stocks and other investments, while slowing the economy by making borrowing more expensive for US households and businesses. The average long-term US mortgage rate has already leaped to its highest level in a year.
Monday’s ease in oil prices helped airlines and other companies with big fuel bills lead the market. United Airlines flew 5.5 per cent higher, while American Airlines climbed 4.7 per cent. Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings steamed 4.5 per cent higher.
Boeing soared 7.2 per cent. US regulators certified its new 737 MAX-7 planes, clearing it for commercial service, following years of work to provide pilots with clearer information and warnings, along with other improvements.
Amazon rose as much as 5.8 per cent on Monday to touch an intraday high, becoming only the fifth company to ever cross the $US3 trillion ($4.3 trillion) market-cap threshold.
Tyson Foods added 1.6 per cent after the meat company reported a slightly stronger profit for the spring than analysts expected. CEO Donnie King said strength is continuing in the company’s chicken business and its prepared foods, which include brands like Jimmy Dean and Hillshire Farm.
It joined a lengthening list of big US companies to deliver a bigger profit for the spring than analysts expected. That’s imperative for Wall Street because stock prices tend to follow the path of corporate earnings over the long term, and worries were rising that US stock prices may have broadly already shot too high.
Companies in the S&P 500 are on track to deliver earnings per share for the spring that are 47 per cent higher than a year before, according to FactSet, with more than half of the companies in the index having already reported. If that ends up being the case, it would be the strongest growth since the spring of 2021, when the economy was roaring out of the COVID pandemic.
Also offering encouragement for profits was a report on Monday showing that growth for US manufacturing accelerated to its strongest level since 2022.
Keeping Wall Street unsettled, though, were swings for stocks of companies that make computer chips. They’ve been veering up and down for weeks on worries about whether their surging revenues because of the artificial-intelligence boom are sustainable.
If AI ends up producing less profit and productivity than hoped, Big Tech companies could curtail their spending sprees on data centres that have helped chip stocks soar to tremendous heights.
Micron Technology went from a drop of 6.4 per cent to a gain of 1.7 per cent through the day before sitting at a gain of 1 per cent, for example. It’s still up roughly 190 per cent for the year so far.
The manic swings for AI stocks have been most dramatic in South Korea, where the Kospi index is dominated by just two tech titans, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.
Seoul’s Kospi fell 5.1 per cent Monday, coming off Friday’s 17.9 per cent surge that was its best day in history.
In neighbouring Japan, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 fell 0.9 per cent after the United States and Japan confirmed they had moved together to prop up the value of the Japanese yen against the dollar. A stronger yen would help to limit inflation in Japan, but it could also potentially hurt Japan’s exporters.
AP, Bloomberg
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