Wall Street Opens Mixed as Claims Sustain Fear of Higher Rates; Dow Down 80 Pts
2022.04.07 16:52
By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com — U.S. stock markets opened mixed on Thursday, as an unexpectedly sharp drop in jobless claims and more hawkish rhetoric from Federal Reserve officials kept the fear of tighter money at the front of the market’s mind.
By 9:45 AM ET (1345 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 84 points, or 0.2% at 34,413 points. The S&P 500 was up 0.1%, however, and the Nasdaq Composite was up 0.3%. That still represents only a modest bounce after two days of heavy losses as the market adjusted to signals from the Fed that interest rates will have to rise faster than previously expected in order to bring inflation down.
One of the main reasons for that is the tightness of the labor market, which was underlined again in data relesed earlier by the Labor Department. Initial jobless claims fell to 166,000, while previous weeks’ data were also revised down to reflect changes to the process of seasonal adjustment by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Layoffs are now running at their lowest in over 50 years, while vacancies are close to record highs and the unemployment rate is down to a paltry 3.6%.
