US stocks rose to one of their best days of the year on Tuesday as Wall Street relaxed after the first of several highly anticipated reports on the economy this week came in better than expected.
- The S&P 500 rose 90.04 points, or 1.7%, to 5,434.43 after the government reported inflation at the wholesale level slowed last month by more than anticipated.
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 408.63 points, or 1%, to 39,765.64.
- The Nasdaq composite rose 407 points, or 2.4%, to 17,187.61.
Starbucks soared 24.5% after it convinced Brian Niccol to
leave his job as CEO of Chipotle to take over the coffee chain.
Chipotle, meanwhile, dropped 7.5%. Niccol has been its chief executive since 2018 and its chairman since 2020. Nvidia rose 6.5% and was the strongest force pushing upward on the S&P 500. Home Depot delivered stronger profit for the spring quarter than analysts expected, but it also said high interest rates and uncertainty about the economy are keeping some customers from spending on home improvement projects, the AP reports. The retail giant lowered its full-year forecasts for an important measure of sales and for profit, even though it topped expectations for the second quarter. Its stock rose 1.2% after flipping earlier between modest gains and losses.
High inflation has been the scourge of shoppers and financial markets for years. It finally looks to be slowing enough to get the Federal Reserve to ease up on high interest rates, which the Fed has been keeping at economy-crunching levels in order to stifle inflation. The Labor Department reported Tuesday that its producer price index—which tracks inflation before it reaches consumers—rose 0.1% from June to July. That was down from a 0.2% rise a month earlier, the AP reports. And compared with a year earlier, prices were up 2.2% in July. That was the smallest such rise since March and was down from a 2.7% year-over-year increase in June.
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