Draghi Dampens Rally in the Stock Market Today
Posted on July 05, 2012 at 13:42 PM EDT
After a nice three-day run going back to last Friday's session, the stock market today is down following dreary statements from Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank. Speaking at a press conference Thursday morning, Draghi commented that the Eurozone would recover gradually and offered little optimism for the region. "The risks surrounding the economic outlook for the euro area continue to be on the downside,"Draghi said at the news conference. "We see now weakening spots of growth in the whole of euro area including countries that had not experienced that before." The ECB lowered its key interest rate by 0.25 percentage point to 0.75% and lowered its deposit rate to zero. The People's Bank of China also cut several key interest rates for the second time in less than a month, bringing its lending rate down by 0.31 percentage point to 6%. The Bank of England decided to enact stimulus measures through quantitative easing, increasing asset purchases by 50 billion euros ($78.1 billion). Domestically better-than-expected job reports were released, showing the fewest layoffs in 13 months and fewer initial unemployment claims filed than in the previous week. For the week ended June 30, about 374,000 initial jobless claims were filed, down 14,000 from the previous week. ADP employment numbers showed that 176,000 private jobs were added last week. This number is a preview to unemployment numbers to be released tomorrow by the Labor Department. Economists expect jobs to be added in the range of 80,000 - 100,000, factoring in government layoffs. These positive labor numbers follow very weak manufacturing reports issued earlier this week and a poor reading from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) on U.S. non-manufacturing businesses. The ISM services index fell to 52.1 in June from the prior month's 53.7. These numbers keep the volatile trend of the markets going as investors go back and forth from hope to worry over European and domestic concerns. Some notable headline-makers in the stock market today include Boeing (NYSE: BA ) and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL ). To continue reading, please click here...