U.S. stocks were off session highs, but holding on to gains on Monday, attempting a bounce after shifting rate expectations triggered Wall Street’s worst week of 2023.How stocks are trading
The Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
+0.25%
was up 113 points, or 0.4%, at 32,930.
The S&P 500
SPX,
+0.36%
advanced 19 points, or 0.5%, to 3,989.
The Nasdaq
COMP,
+0.66%
gained 91 points, or 0.8%, to trade at 11,486.
Stock indexes booked their biggest losses of 2023 last week. The Dow dropped 3% for its biggest weekly decline since the week that ended Sept. 23. The S&P 500 retreated 2.7% for its third straight weekly fall and the Nasdaq fell 3.3%. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq saw their biggest weekly declines since the week ending Dec. 9.
What’s driving markets U.S. stocks were attempting to gain back some of the ground lost last week, when equities fell amid further signs that relatively robust economic activity is helping keep inflation stubbornly high. The PCE inflation measure released on Friday showed price pressures remain elevated, reducing the chances that the Federal Reserve will consider easing monetary policy anytime soon and thus forcing bond yields higher. Despite such data, some investors were brushing aside the report. Jay Hatfield, chief executive of Infrastructure Capital Advisors in New York and portfolio manager of the InfraCap Equity Income ETF
ICAP,
-0.02%,
said he thinks the PCE and U.S. consumer-price index are “overstating inflation.” In particular, he said, PCE contains a number of volatile components such as transportation services “which can reverse month to month and show significant declines.” “We do not believe that the Fed will double down on rate hikes and do 50bp [basis points] at the next meeting,” Hatfield wrote in an email to MarketWatch. “We continue to believe that the Fed is far too bearish about inflation.” Fed Gov. Philip Jefferson said on Monday that he doesn’t support raising the central bank’s 2% inflation target because it “would damage the central bank’s credibility.” In other developments on Monday, U.S. durable-goods orders fell 4.5% in January. Excluding transportation, sales were up 0.7%. Read: Durable-goods orders sink 4.5% — but it’s all Boeing. Overall, report signals that the economy is still growing. A modest pullback in …