NEW YORK (awp international) – After a very weak week on the stock exchange until Thursday, US stocks managed to stabilize on Friday. Statements by US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on the course of interest rate hikes calmed investors a little. The leading index Dow Jones Industrial closed with an increase of 1.47 percent to 32,196.66 points. On a weekly basis, however, there is a loss of a good two percent. The day before, the Dow had fallen to its lowest level since March last year.
The market-wide S&P 500 rose by 2.39 percent to 4023.89 points on the last trading day of the week. The price gains on the Nasdaq stock exchange, which is dominated by technology companies, were even greater. The Nasdaq 100 recovered more strongly by 3.70 percent to 12,387.40 points. But here, too, the weekly loss added up to almost two and a half percent.
Analyst Konstantin Oldenburger from the trading company CMC Markets pointed out that in an interview, Fed Chairman Powell had promised interest rate hikes of half a percentage point each for the next two Fed meetings. “Powell at least lets it be known that he takes indications of collapsing stock markets and a slowdown in growth seriously, even in this situation,” said the expert. Recently, fears that the Fed could stifle growth by raising interest rates to combat high inflation have put pressure on stock prices.
Twitter’s share price slide caused a stir. The takeover of the online service, which was temporarily suspended by Elon Musk, caused Twitter shares to lose almost ten percent. It fell back to pre-bid levels. According to Musk, he first wants to wait for calculations to show that Twitter accounts without real users actually make up less than five percent of all accounts. The billionaire emphasized that he was still interested in the takeover. Analysts suspected that Musk only wanted to lower the purchase price.
In contrast, the Tesla papers, which had recently been badly hit, went up by 5.7 percent. The electric-car maker’s stocks had fallen over a quarter since Musk publicized his interest in Twitter in mid-April.
The shares of the semiconductor manufacturers, which have fallen sharply in the past few weeks, experienced strong price recoveries. The papers from Nvidia and AMD each rose by more than nine percent. In the Dow Jones Industrial, tech stocks such as Salesforce, Apple and Microsoft were also among the biggest winners.
In the meantime, Boeing has topped the Dow with a plus of more than six percent. Most recently, the increase was only 3.3 percent. Dealers referred to a report according to which the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) described the documents submitted by Boeing for a resumption of deliveries of the Dreamliner 787 as insufficient.
Robinhood shareholders saw the share price jump nearly 25 percent after it was announced that Sam Bankman-Fried – CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX – took a 7.6 percent stake in the online broker.
The euro fell to $1.0350 before the weekend, another low since 2017 and last hovered around the $1.04 mark. The European Central Bank (ECB) had previously set the reference rate at 1.0385 (Thursday: 1.0408) dollars. The dollar had thus cost 0.ss629 (0.9608) euros.
After gaining during the week, US Treasuries showed weakness on Friday. The futures contract for ten-year Treasuries (T-Note future) fell by 0.72 percent to 119.14 points. In return, the yield on ten-year government bonds rose to 2.94 percent./bek/he
— By Benjamin Krieger, dpa-AFX —
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