Wall Street wobbles after its sharp slide to start 2021

By STAN CHOE
AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are wobbling between small gains and losses on Tuesday, a day after dropping to their worst loss in months amid the worsening pandemic and potentially market-moving Senate elections.

The S&P 500 was 0.3% higher in late morning trading, after flipping between a gain of 0.6% and a loss of 0.2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 39 points, or 0.1%, at 30,263, as of 10:54 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.6% higher.

The majority of big stocks in the S&P 500 are rising, with oil producers leading the way as crude prices strengthened. Stocks of smaller companies are doing even better, and the Russell 2000 index of small-caps rose a market-leading 1.2%.

The market’s moves are tenuous, though, and the S&P 500 at one point lost all of an early-morning rise even after a report showed U.S. manufacturing grew last month at its strongest rate since 2018.

Two runoff elections are getting underway in Georgia that will determine which party controls the Senate, and some analysts say the results could mark clear winners and losers in the stock market.

The general thinking is that a Democratic sweep would open the door to higher tax rates, tougher regulation on businesses and other potentially profit-crimping changes from Washington. That would put broad pressure on the stock market, with Big Tech stocks in particular perhaps attracting more regulatory scrutiny.

But Democratic control of the Senate, White House and House of Representatives could also make another dose of big financial support for the economy more likely. Democrats have lobbied for $2,000 cash payments to go to most Americans, for example, and they could push for more spending on infrastructure projects.

Such stimulus could eventually lead to higher inflation across the economy, something that has been nearly nonexistent for years. Increasing inflation expectations have helped buoy Treasury yields recently, and the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 0.94% from 0.90% late Monday.

Investors likely shouldn’t worry much about either a Democratic or Republican victory, strategists at Barclays said in a report. Even a Democratic sweep of the runoffs would leave the party with only the slimmest of majorities in the Senate, which would make big, bold changes less likely.

Beyond Georgia and Washington, though, worries about the worsening global pandemic continue to weigh on markets. A new, seemingly more contagious variant of the coronavirus is pushing countries to announce or consider more restrictions on businesses. That’s threatening Wall Street’s widespread belief that financial support offered by central banks and governments can keep the economy afloat until a big recovery sweeps the world later this year due to the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.

Worries are also rising that markets have simply stormed too high since hitting bottom early last year and are setting investors up for big disappointment.

“The long, long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble,” the famed value investor Jeremy Grantham wrote in a recent report titled “Waiting for the last dance.”

“Featuring extreme overvaluation, explosive price increases, frenzied issuance, and hysterically speculative investor behavior, I believe this event will be recorded as one of the great bubbles of financial history, right along with the South Sea bubble, 1929, and 2000.”

Grantham has correctly predicted big market turns in the past, including the plunge caused by the 2008 financial crisis and the sharp rebound higher in early 2009. But he acknowledges that his calls have sometimes been early: He got out of Japanese stocks in 1987, for example, only for the bubble to keep inflating through the end of 1989.

In overseas stock markets, Asian indexes were mostly higher. South Korea’s Kospi rose 1.6%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng added 0.6% and stocks in Shanghai gained 0.7%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 0.4%.

In Europe, France’s CAC 40 fell 0.8%, and Germany’s DAX lost 0.6%. The FTSE 100 in London rose 0.2%.

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AP Business Writer Yuri Kageyama contributed.

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