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Investing.com — U.S. stock markets opened higher on Thursday after encouraging economic data showing labor market strength and less inflation at the factory gate than had been feared.
A mixed bag of earnings from the country’s biggest banks was enough to allow broad advances in all three major indices, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average gaining 297 points, or 0.9%, to 34,674 points. The S&P 500 was up 1.0% and the Nasdaq Composite was up 1.1%.
Earlier, the Labor Department said that initial jobless claims fell to their lowest since the start of the pandemic, at only 293,000, the first time they have been under 300,000 since March 2020. Of equal importance for a market currently obsessed with the inflation outlook was the announcement that the producer price index rose only 0.5% on the month and 8.6% on the year. While the latter still represents the fastest rate of factory gate inflation in many years, both numbers were lower than expected and – as with consumer prices – the rate of monthly price increases is slowing markedly from earlier in the year.
