Retail Latin America: MARKETS ARE MAKING A HUGE COMEBACK AFTER FED COMMENTS

2014/10/16

MARKETS ARE MAKING A HUGE COMEBACK AFTER FED COMMENTS

In another rocky session, US stocks are close to going green.

After St. Louis Fed president James Bullard said on Bloomberg that the Fed should consider pausing its tapering of QE at its next meeting, markets rallied and stocks were close to going positive.

Near 10:45 a.m. ET, the Dow was down 30, the S&P 500 was down 3, and the Nasdaq was down 21. The Russell 2000, which houses small-cap stocks, was up 5 points.

Earlier, the Dow had been down 170 points, the S&P 500 was down 25 points, and the Nasdaq was down 32 points.

US stocks initially took their lead from stocks in Europe, which sold off again.

Greek stocks, which got totally destroyed Wednesday, were down another 2% Thursday.

Meanwhile, Italian stocks were down over 3%, on top of a 4% decline Wednesday, and German stocks were down 1.4%, stocks in London were off 1.5%, and stocks in France were down 1.9%.

There's also a bit of a freak-out on the bond side of things, with Greek 10-year interest rates surging as high as 9%.

On the flip side, the German 10-year yield has hit a record low of 0.718%. US 10-year yields were still trading at about 2% after spiking to as low as 1.86% on Wednesday morning.

Oil is weak again, hanging just above $80 a barrel.

After weaker-than-expected economic data from the US on Wednesday, Thursday morning saw the weekly report on initial jobless claims come in at a 14-year low, as claims fell to 264,000.

Industrial production data came in better than expected, with production jumping 1% month-over-month in September, better than the 0.4% increase expected by economists.

In stocks news, shares of Netflix were getting crushed, falling more than 20% at the market open after the company reported Wednesday night that third-quarter subscriber growth had missed expectations and gave a fourth-quarter earnings outlook that disappointed.