U.S. equities post mixed weekly results as Wall Street assesses economic data

NEW YORK, May 8 (Xinhua) -- U.S. equities posted mixed results in the busy week featuring a wave of key economic data.

For the week ending Friday, the Dow rose 2.7 percent to snap a two-week losing streak, and the S&P 500 advanced 1.2 percent, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.5 percent.

The S&P U.S. Listed China 50 index, which is designed to track the performance of the 50 largest Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges by total market cap, logged a weekly decline of 4.3 percent.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sparked some selling pressure in the equity markets Tuesday when she inferred that interest rates may need to move higher to keep the U.S. economy from overheating.

"For equity markets, there has been a recent history of downside volatility, over short stretches, any time someone at the Fed or Treasury implies any type of monetary tightening. Yellen's comments sparked a similar outcome," experts at Zacks Investment Management said in an analysis.

Yellen clarified on Wednesday that her previous comments about the possibility of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates were not a prediction or a recommendation.

Yellen's remarks came after the Federal Reserve last week kept its benchmark interest rates unchanged at the record-low level of near zero.

Jerome Powell, in his Fed Chair Press Conference last Wednesday, said that the economic recovery was happening faster than expected, but acknowledged the unevenness. He said that "it is not time yet" to talk about tapering the Fed's asset purchase program, as it will "take some time before we see substantial further progress" toward the central bank's employment and inflation goals.

A batch of key economic indicators released this week made investors reassess the momentum of economic recovery.

U.S. employers added 266,000 jobs in April, with the unemployment rate little changed at 6.1 percent, indicating new signs of a stalling labor market recovery, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

The job growth in the United States in March was reduced by 146,000 to 770,000, while the figure for February was up by 68,000 to 536,000, according to the monthly employment report.

The number of the employed in April fell well short of Wall Street's estimates. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had forecast 1 million new jobs.

The April jobs report came one day after the nation's weekly jobless claims data, which saw first-time claims for unemployment insurance in the United States fell below the 500,000 level last week, a fresh pandemic-era low.

U.S. initial jobless claims, a rough way to measure layoffs, stood at 498,000 in the week ending May 1, a decrease of 92,000 from the prior week's revised level, the Department of Labor reported on Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal had forecast new claims to total a seasonally adjusted 527,000.

U.S. Services PMI (Purchasing Managers' Index) fell to 62.7 percent last month from a record 63.7 percent in March, the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said on Wednesday. The reading was weaker than market expectations.

Meanwhile, the ISM manufacturing index dropped to 60.7 percent in April from 64.7 percent in March, also weaker than anticipated.

"Instead of living in fear of a correction and potentially making knee-jerk, emotional decisions as a result, prepare your investments for the long-term by focusing on key data points and economic indicators that could positively impact your investments in the future," Mitch Zacks, CEO at Zacks Investment Management, said in a note on Saturday.