What’s fueling this week’s record-breaking stock rally
CNN
The stock market is racking up record highs again. Investors are wasting no time moving into riskier assets from bitcoin to tech stocks after last week’s long-awaited rate cut from the Federal Reserve.
The stock market is racking up record highs again. Investors are wasting no time moving into riskier assets from bitcoin to tech stocks after last week’s long-awaited rate cut from the Federal Reserve. Last week, the S&P 500 and Dow surged to new highs after the Fed said it is cutting interest rates by half a point, marking a pivot from the aggressive hiking cycle that brought rates to a 23-year high. CNN’s Fear & Greed Index, which measures seven barometers of market sentiment, is at a “greed” reading. Strong economic data this week has kept the party going. The S&P 500 on Thursday marked its 42nd record high close in 2024, while the Dow marked its 31st record high close of the year the prior day. All three major indexes are on pace for a positive week. The Dow has gained 0.9%, the S&P 500 has added 0.7% and the Nasdaq Composite has climbed 1%. The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, showed that the prices consumers paid for goods and services rose 2.2% last month on an annual basis, down from 2.5% in July. The reading was below expectations from economists polled by FactSet, and is a step closer towards the Fed’s 2% inflation target. Fresh data this week has offered further encouragement that the economy is on solid footing. The third estimate for second-quarter gross domestic product showed that the US economy expanded at a solid 3% clip from the prior year.
The DeepSeek drama may have been briefly eclipsed by, you know, everything in Washington (which, if you can believe it, got even crazier Wednesday). But rest assured that over in Silicon Valley, there has been nonstop, Olympic-level pearl-clutching over this Chinese upstart that managed to singlehandedly wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap in just a few hours and put America’s mighty tech titans on their heels.
At her first White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made an unusual claim about inflation that has stung American shoppers for years: Leavitt said egg prices have continued to surge because “the Biden administration and the department of agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage.”