NEW YORK — U.S. stocks rallied Thursday in Wall Street’s latest sharp swerve after a better-than-expected report on unemployment eased worries about a slowing economy. The S&P 500 jumped 2.3% for its best day since 2022 and shaved off all but 0.5% of its loss from what was a brutal start to the week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 683 points, or 1.8%, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 2.9% as Nvidia and other Big Tech stocks helped lead the way. Treasury yields also climbed in the bond market in a signal that investors are feeling less worried about the economy after a report showed fewer U.S. workers applied for unemployment benefits last week. The number was better than economists expected. It was exactly a week ago that worse-than-expected data on unemployment claims helped enflame worries that the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates too high for too long in order to beat inflation. That helped send markets reeling worldwide, along with a rate hike by the Bank of Japan that sent shockwaves worldwide by scrambling a favorite trade among some hedge funds. At the worst of it, at least so far, the S&P 500 was down nearly 10% from its all-time high set last month. Such drops are regular occurrences on Wall Street, and corrections of 10% happen roughly every year or two. After Thursday’s jump, the index is back within about 6% of its record. What made this decline particularly scary was how quickly it happened. A measure of how much investors are paying to protect themselves from future drops for the S&P 500 briefly surged toward its highest level since the COVID crash of 2020. Still, the market’s swings look more like a “positioning-driven crash” caused by too many investors piling into similar trades and then exiting them together, rather than the start of a long-term downward market caused by a recession, according to strategists at BNP Paribas.
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