A zoom higher for Tesla helped drive Wall Street to more records on Tuesday.
- The S&P 500 rose 33.92 points, or 0.6% to 5,509.01 to top its all-time high set two weeks ago.
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 162.33, or 0.4%, to 39,331.85.
- The Nasdaq composite climbed 149.46, or 0.8%, to 18,028.76 from its own record set a day earlier.
Tesla led the way with a 10.2% jump after the electric-vehicle maker reported
better sales for the spring than analysts feared. Treasury yields eased after the head of the Federal Reserve cited encouraging progress on inflation, which bolstered hopes for cuts to interest rates later this year.
But losses for some big, influential stocks offset Tesla's leap, the AP reports. Nvidia, which has become the poster child of the rush into artificial-intelligence technology, fell 1.3% and was the heaviest weight on the S&P 500. Eli Lily dropped 0.8% after President Biden said in an opinion piece for USA Today that the company is charging "unconscionably high prices" for its treatment for weight loss and diabetes. In commodities markets, a barrel of benchmark US crude oil fell 0.5% after earlier touching its highest price since April. Brent crude, the international standard, fell 0.3%.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose utterances are always finely parsed for hints about rates, gave a nod to improvements in inflation data after some disappointingly high readings early in the year. "We just want to understand that the levels that we're seeing are a true reading of underlying inflation," he said. The hope on Wall Street is that inflation will slow enough to get the Fed to pull down its main interest rate, which has been sitting at its highest level in more than two decades and pressing the brakes on the economy.
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A report on Tuesday may have hindered those hopes, though. It showed US employers were advertising more job openings at the end of May than economists expected and slightly more than April's tally. While plentiful job openings are great news for workers, the fear on Wall Street is that too strong of a job market will put upward pressure on inflation and force delays to rate cuts. (More stock market stories.)
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