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Stocks rally, Treasuries and oil slip, Fed signals rate hike if certain conditions persist, Mortgage rates back over 7%, Applications for jobless claims fall, Bitcoin and Ethereum plunge over Silvergate fears.
Stocks rallied on Friday and were on the path to a weekly gain. Stocks climbed as US Treasury yields retreated, with the major averages on their way to a positive week. The S&P 500 was on pace to snap a three-week decline, CNBC reported.
S&P 500 futures were up 9.75 points or +0.24%, while Dow Jones Industrial Average futures advanced 64 points or +0.19%, and NASDAQ futures climbed 21.5 points or +0.18%, Yahoo Finance reported.
The day after the 10-year U.S. Treasury rose above the 4% mark for the first time since early November and the 2-year climbed to a level not seen since mid-2006, Treasuries declined on Friday.
The benchmark 10-Year Treasury was down -0.053 for a yield of 4.022%, while the 2-Year Treasury dipped -0.024 for a yield of 4.88%, as of 8:15 AM EST.
In oil futures, WTI crude was down -0.41% and trading at $77.88 a barrel, while Brent crude was down -0.5% in trading at $84.33 a barrel, as of 8:17 AM EST.
The Federal Reserve has laid out three conditions that would trigger an even higher raise in key interest rates. The factors are continued strong job growth, a failure for consumer spending to slow, and persistent inflation, a key federal official, who is a member of the Fed’s board and its interest-rate setting committee, said on Thursday, USA Today reported.
Applications for unemployment benefits fell for a third straight week, as new applications for the week ending February 25 totaled 190,000, a drop from 192,000 the previous week, according to statistics released by the Labor Department on Thursday, AOL reported. It also marked the seventh straight week that jobless claims were under 200,000. Last month, unemployment fell to 3.4%, the lowest level since 1969.
On Thursday, mortgage rates jumped over 7% again, as they rose to 7.1%, according to Mortgage News Daily. It comes amid growing fears that inflation is not cooling off, which has pushed bond yields higher on Thursday. Mortgage rates loosely follow the yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury, CNBC reported.
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as the wider crypto market, were hit hard on Friday amid industry concerns and several crypto firms distancing themselves from the crypto-friendly bank Silvergate, which saw its shares freefall on Thursday, Yahoo Finance reported. Silvergate gave notice late Wednesday it wouldn’t meet a March 16 extension to file its annual report, casting doubt on its ability to continue over the next 12 months. Shares were down as much as 56% in afternoon trading on Thursday.
Bitcoin was down 4.5% in the past 24 hours, dropping from $23,500 to a two-week low of $22,390 on Friday at press time, while Ethereum fell 4.6% and was at $1,569 at the time of this writing, Decrypt reported. Dogecoin took a harder hit, losing 6.2%, Solana and Avalanche lost between 4-5%, and Litecoin took the hardest hit, losing 8.5%.
