NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are drifting Tuesday in a rare quiet day for financial markets worldwide, for now at least.
The S&P 500 was up 0.2% in early trading, though it’s been prone to huge swings not just day to day but also hour to hour. It’s regularly careened more than 1 percentage point within each day as markets struggle to keep up with President Donald Trump’s trade war, which economists warn could cause a global recession unless it’s scaled back.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 44 points, or 0.1%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.3% higher.
Perhaps more importantly, the U.S. bond market was also showing more signs of calm after its sudden and sharp moves last week raised worries that investors worldwide may no longer see U.S. government bonds as a no-brainer go-to when times are scary.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury was holding steady at 4.38%, where it eased to on Monday from 4.48% at the end of last week. It had been at just 4.01% a week earlier.
The value of the U.S. dollar also steadied after its fall last week raised more worries that Trump’s trade war was degrading its status as another safe-haven investment, like U.S. Treasury bonds. The dollar’s value ticked higher against the euro and Swiss franc but slipped against the British pound.
On Wall Street, Bank of America climbed 3.9% after the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank reported stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.
Most big U.S. banks have been reporting strong results for the start of the year, boosted by their stock trading desks taking advantage of all the huge swings caused by Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff announcements. Citigroup also topped analysts’ expectations, and its stock rose 2.3%.
Boeing helped weigh on the market after Beijing ordered Chinese airlines not to take further deliveries of the U.S. aerospace company’s planes and to halt purchases of aircraft equipment from U.S. companies, according to a Bloomberg report. Boeing slid 1.4%.
The world’s two largest economies have been announcing ever-increasing tariffs on each other’s goods, along with other countermeasures to worsen their trade war. Trump has said he wants to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, and he also wants to trim how much more his country exports to other countries than it imports.
China’s leadership, meanwhile, has been trying to present itself as a source of “stability and certainty” as it visits countries across Southeast Asia this week.
In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe and Asia. Germany’s DAX returned 1.1%, and the FTSE 100 in London added 0.9%.
Automakers helped drive indexes higher in Asia, where Japan’s Nikkei 225 added 0.8% and South Korea’s Kospi rose 0.9%.
Chinese stocks wobbled, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rising 0.2% after fluctuating much of the day. Stocks in Shanghai added 0.1%.
___
AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.