NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are drifting Monday after the French market roared higher as elections continue to drive swings in financial markets worldwide.
The S&P 500 was 0.1% higher in morning trading as it kicked off a short, four-day week that includes the Fourth of July holiday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 187 points, or 0.5%, as of 10:10 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was virtually unchanged.
Some of the world’s strongest action was across the Atlantic, where the CAC 40 index in Paris jumped as much as 2.8% before settling to a gain of 1.8%. Results from France suggested that a far-right political party may not win a decisive majority in the country’s legislative elections. That could mean France may avoid one of the worst-case scenarios for financial markets, where such a victory could lead to policies that would greatly increase the French government’s debt and other challenges.
This is a big year for elections worldwide, with voters heading to the polls in the United Kingdom later this week and soon elsewhere. In the United States, pollsters are measuring the fallout from last week’s debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. It all underscores “political polarisation and how elections are determining economics, rather than vice versa,” according to Nick Gentle and other members of the product management group at Barclays.
Yields have been generally trending lower since the 10-year Treasury yield topped 4.70% in late April. They’ve been easing on hopes that inflation will slow enough to convince the Federal Reserve to cut its main interest rate later this year, down from the highest level in more than two decades. High rates have been slowing the U.S. economy by making it more expensive to borrow for a house, car or anything else.
Hopes for rate cuts strengthened after a report showed U.S. manufacturing weakened last month by more than economists expected. Perhaps even more importantly for Wall Street, the report from the Institute for Supply Management also showed price increases are decelerating, even if prices are still rising. Taken together, the data could offer more of the evidence of lessening pressure on inflation that the Federal Reserve wants before it will cut rates.
This week’s highlight for economic reports will likely arrive on Friday, when the U.S. government will say how many workers got hired to payrolls during June. Economists predict overall hiring slowed to 190,000 from May’s 272,000. That would get the number closer to what Bank of America calls the “Goldilocks” figure of roughly 150,000, give or take 25,000.
At that level, the U.S. economy could continue to grow and avoid a recession without being so strong that it puts too much upward pressure on inflation.
On Wall Street, Chewy swung from a big early gain to a loss of 4.1% after a widely followed trader named Keith Gill revealed he owned just over 9 million shares of the pet supply company. That’s about 6.6% of the entire company, according to a filing made Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Gill came to fame during the original meme-stock craze of 2021 that saw GameStop rally to market-bending heights. Through it, Gill became the face of fans pushing GameStop ever upward. Gill had returned to talking about GameStop again recently, which helped its stock rally. But it fell 5.5% Monday following his disclosure about Chewy.
Elsewhere on Wall Street, Spirit AeroSystems rose 3.6% after Boeing said it would buy the maker of fuselages and other airplane parts for $4.7 billion in stock and assume about $3.6 billion of its debt.
Boeing, which rose 2.4%, has been facing tougher scrutiny from the government and the airlines who buy its planes over worries about safety and quality. Boeing previously owned Spirit AeroSystems, and the purchase reverses a longtime company strategy of outsourcing key work on its passenger planes.
Meta Platforms fell 1.8% after European Union regulators accused it of breaching the bloc’s new digital competition rulebook by forcing Facebook and Instagram users to choose between seeing ads or paying to avoid them.
In stock markets abroad, Japan’s Nikkei 225 added 0.1% after a quarterly survey by the Bank of Japan called the “tankan” showed a modest improvement in confidence among the country’s largest manufacturers in April through June.
Stocks in Shanghai rose 0.9% following mixed data on the world’s second-largest economy.