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Stocks rise slightly after 5-day streak of losses – Jobless claims hit 10-month high – Oil prices rise after Keystone pipeline shut over leak – 270K people who bought homes in 2022 are underwater
After five consecutive days of losses on Wall Street, US stocks rose slightly on Thursday. The S&P 500 buoyed 0.4%, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 130 points, also about 0.4%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite also lifted by roughly the same margin.
As of 10:41 AM EST, the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury bond moved up +0.0562, yielding 3.466%.
West Texas Intermediate crude futures climbed nearly 3%.
Next week, the all-important Consumer Price Index (CPI) is due out on Tuesday, day one of the two-day Federal Reserve meeting on December 13-14, where the organization is expected to lift the benchmark interest rates by at least 50 basis points, Yahoo Finance reported.
An uptick in the number of Americans filing for jobless claims last week, as applications for unemployment benefits rose to 230,000 for the week ending December 3, the Labor Department reported on Thursday.
The number represents an increase of 4,000 over the previous week’s 226,000 claims, with the four-week moving average rising by 1000 to 230,000, US News reported.
Continuing unemployment claims rose by 62,002, with unemployment rolls hitting a 10-month high for the week ending November 26, Reuters reported.
The Keystone Pipeline was shut down following a discovery of a leak near the border of Kansas and Nebraska, sending US oil prices climbing by about 4 percent on Thursday morning, CNN reported. US oil prices moved higher by 3.9% to $74.85 a barrel. No timeline has been given for the repair or restarting the 2,700-mile system that delivers Canadian and American oil to major refineries across the US.
About 270,000 buyers who purchased a home in 2022 are underwater on their mortgages, while 450,000 of all home mortgage holders are also underwater, according to a new analysis by Black Knight.
Roughly 60 percent of all borrowers underwater on their mortgage had a loan that originated in the first nine months of 2022. That works out to about 1 and 12 homes purchased this year with a mortgage, or 8 percent, Yahoo reported.
Further, nearly 40 percent of homes purchased this year have less than 10 percent of equity that can be tapped.
The figures reflect the effects of rapidly rising mortgage rates, as well as cooling home prices, which are dropping at a record pace month over month.
