The key indices on Wall Street turned up on the penultimate trading day of the week, after Wednesday’s rise had completely evaporated by the end of trading in the evening. Now the market is holding its breath before the “nonfarm payrolls” figures come out on Friday afternoon.

This is how it looked after the end of the stock exchange:

  • The Nasdaq rose 1.4 percent.
  • The Dow Jones rose 0.2 percent.
  • The S&P 500 rose 0.8 percent.

Both the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 thus broke a series of declines for three days in a row.

The two-year interest rate in the USA has come down somewhat and stands at around 4.59 per cent, while the ten-year interest rate has risen cautiously to 4.15 per cent.

The most important number of the month

So far this week, there has been a wait-and-see mood in the US stock market at the same time as there has been a steady flow of figures for the US labor market. As is well known, the series ends tomorrow, when the figures that are often referred to as the most important of the month are presented before the start of trading.

On Thursday, so-called “jobless claims”, or the number of first-time applicants for unemployment benefits, showed 220,000 people last week, a number that was somewhat below expectations.

On Wednesday, labor market figures for the private sector showed that 103,000 new jobs were created in November, which was a further dampening from the downwardly adjusted October figures. Wage growth last month was the lowest in two years.

Interest rate cut by summer?

The market has become more and more certain that the Federal Reserve and central bank governor will be able to achieve a soft landing for the American economy, where inflation will come down without slowing growth completely.

From a number of quarters, it has been pointed to a surprising strength for the American economy despite a sharp increase in the key interest rate, which in turn means increased borrowing costs for both people and businesses.

There is now complete agreement in the market that there will be interest rate cuts already before the summer. At the time of writing, at least one interest rate cut is priced in by the start of May and two cuts by June.

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