US stocks jumped again Thursday as rising oil prices helped Wall Street shrug off surging job losses for the fifth straight week.
The Dow Jones industrial average climbed as much as 409.54 points, or 1.7 percent, despite the US Labor Department reporting 4.4 million applications for unemployment benefits last week, bringing the number of people put out of work by the coronavirus crisis to 26 million.
The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite each posted gains as large as 1.6 percent following the grim report, which showed the pandemic has wiped out more jobs than the nation added since the Great Recession.
All three indexes have risen on the past five Thursdays even as the feds revealed millions more workers had been sidelined — a trend that investors expected as the virus kneecapped the global economy, according to experts.
“It isn’t as if the market is immune to bad news — it isn’t — but it has to be new bad news,” said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist for Prudential Financial.
Wall Street seemed to find a silver lining in the fact that the number of jobless claims fell for the third consecutive week even though it’s still at a level without recent precedent.
“Financial markets have quickly adjusted to a disheartening pace in filings for unemployment benefits,” Ed Moya, senior market analyst at OANDA, said in a commentary. “Massive job losses are still expected over the coming weeks as more people become furloughed and as backlogs clear.”
Stocks were helped by a continued rebound in oil prices following their historic nosedive at the start of the week, when one key price turned negative for the first time ever.
West Texas Intermediate crude futures surged 27.2 percent to $17.53 a barrel as of 12:46 p.m., while international Brent crude futures jumped 9.2 percent to $22.26. Big oil companies Exxon and Chevron saw their share prices rise as much as 6 percent and 5.1 percent, respectively, amid the jump.
Thursday’s boost came as Kuwait said it would cut its oil supply sooner than expected under an international deal to reduce production by 9.7 million barrels a day. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies reached the agreement as demand for oil plummeted thanks to the coronavirus crisis.
But experts expect prices to remain under pressure as the pandemic continues to keep consumers out of cars and airplanes that burn up loads of fuel in normal times.
“Demand remains extremely low and a sustainable recovery rally is unlikely to occur anytime soon,” AxiCorp market analyst Milan Cutkovic said.
With Post wires
