Stock market today: Wall Street ticks higher after French market jumps

NEW YORK (AP): U.S. stocks are drifting higher Monday, following the French market as elections continue to drive swings in financial markets worldwide.

The S&P 500 was 0.2% higher as it kicked off a short, four-day week that includes the Fourth of July holiday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 227 points, or 0.6%, as of 9:40 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.1% higher.

Some of the world’s strongest action was across the Atlantic, where the CAC 40 index in Paris jumped as much as 2.8% before settling to a gain of 1.9%. Results from France suggested that a far-right political party may not win a decisive majority in the country’s legislative elections. That could mean the country may avoid one of the worst-case scenarios for financial markets, where such a victory could lead to policies that would greatly increase the French government’s debt and other challenges.

This is a big year for elections worldwide, with voters heading to the polls in the United Kingdom later this week and soon elsewhere. In the United States, pollsters are measuring the fallout from last week’s debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. It all underscores “political polarisation and how elections are determining economics, rather than vice versa,” according to Nick Gentle and other members of the product management group at Barclays.

Treasury yields rose in the U.S. bond market, a signal that investors were feeling less pressure to own the safest U.S. investments. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.43% from 4.39% late Friday.

Yields have been generally trending lower since the 10-year yield topped 4.70% in late April. Hopes are rising that inflation will slow enough to convince the Federal Reserve to cut its main interest rate later this year, down from the highest level in more than two decades. High rates are slowing the U.S. economy by making it more expensive to borrow for a house, car or anything else.

On Wall Street, Chewy rose 5.7% after a widely followed trader named Keith Gill revealed that he owns just over 9 million shares of the pet supply company. That’s about 6.6% of the entire company, according to a filing made Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Gill came to fame during the original meme-stock craze of 2020 that saw GameStop rally to market-bending heights. Through it all, Gill became the face of fans pushing GameStop ever upward. Gill had returned to talking about GameStop again recently, which helped its stock rally. But it fell 6.4% Monday following his disclosure about Chewy.

Elsewhere on Wall Street, Spirit AeroSystems rose 4.4% after Boeing said it would buy the maker of fuselages and other airplane parts for $4.7 billion in stock and assume about $3.6 billion of its debt.

Boeing, which rose 3.3%, has been facing tougher scrutiny from the government and the airlines who buy its planes over worries about safety and quality. Boeing previously owned Spirit, and the purchase reverses a longtime company strategy of outsourcing key work on its passenger planes.

Meta Platforms dipped 0.3% after European Union regulators accused it of breaching the bloc’s new digital competition rulebook by forcing Facebook and Instagram users to choose between seeing ads or paying to avoid them.

In stock markets abroad, Japan’s Nikkei 225 added 0.1% after a quarterly survey by the Bank of Japan, called the “tankan,” showed a modest improvement in confidence among the country’s largest manufacturers in April-June.

However the government downgraded its estimate for growth in the first quarter of the year, to a minus 2.9% annual rate from the earlier figure of minus 1.8%.

Stocks in Shanghai rose 0.9% following some mixed data on the world’s second-largest economy. A survey of factory purchasing managers, reported over the weekend, showed conditions remained in contraction for a second straight month.

But a similar private-sector survey of manufacturing activity released Monday showed an improvement in business conditions.