Strong Corporate Balance Sheets on Wall Street – Significant Price Gains in Tech Stocks

Frankfurt/New York The prospect of a slower pace of interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve is buoying US stock markets. The stock indices Dow Jones, Nasdaq and S&P 500 expand their gains and rise by up to 3.6 percent.

The dollar index, which reflects the exchange rate for major currencies, lost 0.5 percent to 106.59 points. During his press conference explaining the latest rate hike, US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said, among other things, that a slower pace of interest rate hikes might be appropriate – but also emphasized the possibility of another large rate hike.

Before Powell’s appearance, events on Wall Street had been shaped primarily by the strong balance sheets of corporations such as Microsoft or Google’s parent company Alphabet. The US standard value index Dow Jones rose on Wednesday by almost half a percent to 31,886 points. The broad-based S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq gained 1.4 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively.