Business Notes: Stock Market Sees Up Day, But Gains Aren't Enough To Make Up For Yesterday's Losses
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) - In today's business notes, the every-other-day pattern in the stock markets continued today. After yesterday's down day, the markets moved to the upside today.
Unfortunately, the same pattern held today in that any gains made on an "up day," did not make up for the previous day's losses.
Once again today, almost all of the economic news is tied to the coronavirus.
The Labor Department reports that weekly unemployment applications surged ahead by roughly 70,000 in the week ending last Friday.
As this outbreak continues and more people are losing their jobs, that number is expected to grow substantially every week.
As if the decline in the stock market isn't enough, some corporations, such as Ford, have decided to stop paying stock dividends.
Helping the markets today was action taken by the Fed and Bank of England.
The Fed has now launched a new lending facility to serve as a "backstop" for U.S. money market funds, and the Bank of England lowered its key interest rate to a record low.
Looking ahead, if you think things have been volatile on Wall Street recently, wait until tomorrow.
That is when contracts expire on certain types of investments like options and futures contracts. Trading can increase by 50 percent when an expiration day hits. Tomorrow could surpass that.
Again, at least for today it was an up day.
Here are the closing numbers:
- the Dow a gain of 188 points or nearly one percent
- the NASDAQ was up 160 points or two percent
- and, the S&P 500 registered a gain of 11 points or a half of a percent.
We'll see what tomorrow brings.
