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Dow marks its first decline of 2012
Photo
A pair of bulls is displayed in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday to promote the Professional Bull Riders annual event at Madison Square Garden. Stocks steadily gained ground Thursday after falling sharply at the open. Investors weighed renewed concern about Europe against the latest encouraging report about the U.S. job market.
Associated Press
It took the whole day, but stocks came all the way back.
Bruised once again by uncertainty about European debt, the U.S. stock market fell sharply Thursday at the open, then steadily gained ground for six hours. By the close, the Dow Jones industrial average had shaved its loss to less than three points.
It was the first decline of the year for the Dow. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index gained just under four points and managed to extend its January winning streak to three days.
Investors looking for good news had the latest encouraging report on the U.S. job market. Weekly unemployment claims declined again, one day before a crucial report on the national jobs picture in December.
The Dow recovered from a 134-point loss to end at 12,415.70. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index closed at 1,281.06. The Nasdaq rose 21.5 points to 2,669.86.
The market has had a strong start to the year. The Dow is up almost 200 points, or 1.6 percent. The S&P 500 is up 1.9 percent. And the technology-focused Nasdaq is already up 2.5 percent.
Stocks spent the morning lower after Europe — which dominated so much of Wall Street’s hectic 2011 — became a concern again.
Trading in UniCredit, a large Italian bank, was halted after the stock lost a quarter of its value. The bank said Wednesday that it would need to offer huge discounts to investors to raise money.
And a financial crisis deepened in Hungary, which had to pay a staggeringly high interest rate of 10 percent on its 12-month debt. That is far above the 7-percent level that forced Greece and Portugal to seek bailouts.
Taken together, the news raised fears on Wall Street that Europe’s debt crisis would spread from small countries such as Greece and infect much larger ones such as Italy that are too big to be bailed out.
“The positives that are coming out of our economy are less significant than the fear that is coming out of Europe,” said Ralph Fogel, an investment strategist and partner at Fogel Neale Partners in New York.
Stocks fell more than 2 percent in Italy, Greece and Spain. Markets in the bigger, more stable economies of Britain and Germany fell slightly. The CAC-40 in France fell 1.5 percent.