Wall Street closes its best week of the year with more gains

NEW YORK —  Wall Street coasted to the close of its best week since November, as U.S. stocks drifted a bit higher Friday.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 rose 0.2% for a seventh straight gain and pulled back within 2% of its all-time high set last month. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 0.2%, and the Nasdaq composite added 0.2%.

Treasury yields eased in the bond market after after a couple of mixed reports on the U.S. economy. One showed home builders broke ground on fewer projects last month than forecast, which threw some cold water on the market. Optimism had been rising earlier in the week after a flurry of better-than-expected reports on such things as inflation and sales at U.S. retailers.

But a report later in the morning suggested U.S. consumers are feeling better about the economy than expected. That’s a big deal for Wall Street because their spending makes up the bulk of the economy.

Friday’s relatively calm trading capped a manic week when strong economic data helped right Wall Street after a scary run. The S&P 500 had briefly dropped close to 10% below its record last week, as stocks reeled worldwide on a range of worries. Many of those questions are still hanging over the market, just not quite as precariously as before.

One concern centered on the strength of the U.S. economy after a surprisingly weak report on hiring last month.

Even though confidence rose in the economy’s strength after this week’s strong run of reports, it is still probably slowing under the weight of high interest rates. That’s by design. The Federal Reserve’s goal has been trying to cool what was a hot job market by making it more expensive for companies and households to borrow and spend. The Fed did that that to remove upward pressure on inflation, which peaked at more than 9% two summers ago.

The question is whether the slowdown in the economy’s growth will overshoot and become a recession. That’s still to be determined, but the hope on Wall Street is that an expected interest rate cut at the Fed’s next meeting in September will help forestall that.

The market’s focus will swing next week to Jackson Hole, Wyo. That’s where Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell will give a speech late in the week, and the setting has been home to big policy announcements in the past.

Because the Fed has said its upcoming moves will depend in large part on what data reports at the time say, “It will be difficult for Powell to pre-commit to a particular trajectory at Jackson Hole,” say economists at Deutsche Bank led by Matthew Luzzetti.

But Powell could offer hints about whether the Fed is hoping to merely remove the brakes from the economy through rate cuts or give it an accelerant.

A second big concern for the market has been whether investors took the prices of Nvidia and other highly influential Big Tech stocks too high in their frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology.

That debate is still ongoing. Within just an hour Friday morning, Nvidia went from being the single heaviest weight on the S&P 500 to the strongest force lifting the index. It flipped from an early 1.4% drop to end with a rise of 1.4%.

Such swings have become typical for the stock that’s become the face of the AI craze. After soaring more than 170% through the year’s first six and a half months, Nvidia plunged more than 20% over the ensuing three weeks.

A third factor that’s caused global markets’ big swings is more technical, one triggered by an interest rate increase by the Bank of Japan. That forced hedge funds around the world to abandon a popular trade en masse, where they had borrowed Japanese yen at cheap rates to invest elsewhere.

The forced and sudden selling that ensued hit markets worldwide, but it calmed after a top Bank of Japan official said it won’t raise rates further as long as markets are unstable. Analysts, though, say more potential selling may still be left to uncoil in the system.

On Wall Street, H&R Block leaped 12.1% for one of the market’s largest gains after it reported a bigger-than-expected profit for the latest quarter. It also increased its dividend 17% and announced a stock buyback program of up to $1.5 billion.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 11.03 points to 5,554.25. The Dow gained 96.70 points to 40,659.76, and the Nasdaq composite added 37.22 points to close at 17,631.72.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 3.88% from 3.92% late Thursday. The two-year yield, which more closely tracks expectations for Fed action, fell to 4.05% from 4.10% late Thursday.

In stock markets abroad, Japan’s Nikkei 225 jumped 3.6% to cap its best week in more than four years. It was a strong rebound from its sharp losses the week before, which included the worst day for the Japanese stock market since the Black Monday crash of 1987.

Choe writes for the Associated Press.