Major stock indices traded higher on strong earnings, while investors remain wary over Trump’s threats to the Fed.
U.S. stocks gained on strong retail data. On Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 180 points or 0.4% while the S&P 500 rose 0.48% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 0.79%.
Traders will also be closely watching Netflix earnings. The streaming giant is set to report strong earnings of $7.07 per share, which is 45% higher than in the same quarter of last year.
Traders cheered the latest retail sales figures from the Commerce Department, which rose 0.6% in June on a monthly level. Figures rebounded from a steep drop in May, when sales declined 0.9%. This suggests that President Donald Trump’s tariff policy has yet to have a negative impact on consumer confidence.
“The consumer basically seems to be fine,” said JPMorgan Chase CFO Jeremy Barnum during the earnings call on Tuesday. “If you look at indicators of stress, not surprisingly, you see a little bit more stress in the lower income bands than you see in the higher income bands, but that’s always true,” he said, adding that loan delinquency rates are within expectations.
Inflation fears eat into consumer confidence
Still, these figures are not adjusted for inflation, which rose significantly in June. Notably, after factoring in price increases, consumer spending rose just 0.3%, far short of the 0.9% May price drop. For this reason, traders will be closely monitoring the situation with the Fed, which has been under fire from the White House.
“Fed independence is very important, and it’s something we should fight to preserve,” Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO David Solomon said in a Wednesday interview. Echoing him were the executives from JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and other banking giants.
