By Friday, the S&P 500 was on track to end the month with a gain of about 6.7 percent — its best showing since November 2020, when stocks jumped more than 10 percent as drug companies reported strong results for their coronavirus vaccine candidates.
In September, worries that high inflation, slowing growth and supply chain logjams would lead to economic misery for American companies and consumers, pulling the S&P 500 down about 4.8 percent.
Of the 244 companies in the S&P 500 to report third-quarter results as of Thursday, 82 percent have done better than Wall Street analysts had forecast, according to the data provider Refinitiv.
And a deal to sell 100,000 of its electric cars to the rental company Hertz pushed Tesla’s stock value beyond $1 trillion for the first time.
On Friday, Exxon Mobil and Chevron both reported a third-consecutive quarterly profit of more than $6 billion.
On Friday, shares of Amazon tumbled 3.1 percent after the company reported its slowest sales growth in almost seven years as the pandemic-fueled surge in online shopping eased.
Investors were also encouraged by signs of progress among Democrats in Washington toward an agreement on a spending plan.
Wall Street has been concerned about rising prices for months, and though inflation remains high, several recent measures of price gains eased concerns about the continuing increases somewhat.
So it also helped that some economic data highlighted ongoing risks to the economy, something that might keep the Fed from moving too quickly, said Fiona Cincotta, senior financial markets analyst at Forex.com.
For example, thanks in part to supply-chain bottlenecks, the U.S.
The Fed has made it clear it is not planning to raise its benchmark interest rate — the strongest tool it has to affect the economy — anytime soon, but the central bank is expected to begin winding down a bond-buying program that has been in place since early in the pandemic.
Prices climbed 0.3 percent from August to September, in line with what economists expected and slower than rapid numbers posted earlier in the summer.
The new data come ahead of a Fed meeting next week, at which the central bank will provide an update on its latest thinking about price increases.
Pay and benefits picked up rapidly for working Americans in the three months through September, separate data released Friday showed, and especially for employees in service occupations.
Many would-be employees remain on the labor market’s sidelines, likely because of concerns about the virus and child-care issues, and policymakers want to make sure that the economy is strong and jobs are available when they are ready to return.
Policymakers also waiting to see what happens as consumers spend down savings stockpiles built up during the pandemic and return to more normal living patterns, spending more on airplane tickets and theater dates and less on living room furniture and home office equipment.
Fed officials believe inflation will fade as supply chain snarls unravel and consumer demand for goods cools, but it remains unclear when that will happen.
The inflation data released on Friday confirm what more timely measures like the Consumer Price Index had already shown: For now, price gains remain unusually brisk.
Demand has yet to drastically fade.
A measure of incomes that includes benefit payments decreased 1 percent last month as more generous unemployment payments expired and other pandemic relief programs slowed or stopped payouts.
On an annual basis, the Employment Cost Index climbed 3.7 percent, the fastest pace since 2004.
Strong wage gains could help to sustain demand and may keep inflation higher than normal, especially as companies try to remain profitable even as they pay more for labor.
The central bank has been buying $120 billion in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities, but it is poised to announce its plan to slow that program as soon as its meeting next week.
That would leave the Fed in a position to raise its policy interest rate, its more traditional and arguably more powerful tool, should it need to do so to tamp down price increases.
When the Fed raises interest rates, it makes it more expensive to borrow to buy houses, cars and washing machines.
The eurozone economy continued its expansion through the summer as the region recovered from a double-dip recession, data published on Friday showed.
A surge in natural gas prices, caused by several factors including low stockpiles, disappointing supply from Russia and demand from China, is one of the key drivers of inflation.
The economy is rebounding from a recession at the end of 2020 and in the first quarter of this year, when a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic led to tight social restrictions across the region.
“From here on, do expect moderation,” Bert Colijn, an economist at ING Bank, wrote in a note to clients.
Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, also said on Thursday that she expected the economic momentum to slow down, and the bank decided to keep its loose monetary stance unchanged.
And she is confident the factors driving prices higher, including a mismatch in supply and demand, are temporary and that inflation will ease over the course of next year.
In the third quarter, the American benchmark oil price remained near a seven-year high, ending the period at $76 a barrel.
Throughout most of 2020, Exxon and other oil companies lost money as commodity prices collapsed under the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic, which halted air travel and commuting.
Exxon, Chevron and other major oil companies have shifted their emphasis from expanding exploration to a more disciplined, cautious approach to break the pattern in which higher prices led to increased production, which in turn led to a return to lower prices.
Chevron said its capital spending so far this year was 22 percent lower than a year ago.
Politico was founded in 2007 by Robert Allbritton, whose family had owned a television company and the controlling stake of a local bank, and made a name for itself with a scoop-driven, insider style.
Axel Springer, a German publishing giant whose largest shareholder is KKR, the private equity giant, agreed to purchase Politico, Politico Europe and the Politico-owned tech news site Protocol this summer as part of its expansion into the United States.
Last year, Axel Springer acquired a controlling stake in the newsletter publisher Morning Brew.
Earlier this month, Axel Springer removed Bild’s top editor, Julian Reichelt, after a report in The Times about a Bild trainee who had testified that Mr. Reichelt had asked her to a hotel for sex and to keep a payment under wraps.
Starbucks employees in upstate New York seeking to unionize notched a victory in their effort on Thursday, a day after the company, which is facing a staffing shortage, said that it would raise wages for U.S.
In a win for the union seeking to represent the employees, the three stores will vote in separate elections, meaning that workers need only a majority of votes cast at a single location to form a union.
The campaign represents the most serious union effort at Starbucks in years.
All hourly employees will earn at least $15 an hour, and the company will raise its average pay to $17 an hour by the summer of 2022.
The company has denied that it was seeking to delay the elections and argued that workers at all 20 stores should vote together because they can work at multiple locations and because upper-level managers oversee decisions across a range of stores.
Since workers at the three stores filed for union elections in late August, Starbucks has sent a number of managers, more senior company officials and even a top corporate executive to Buffalo.
That was up from four million in July and is by far the most in the two decades the government has been keeping track.
Amazon on Thursday posted its slowest sales growth in almost seven years as the pandemic-fueled surge in online shopping eased.
Apple said on Thursday that its sales jumped by 29 percent and profit surged 62 percent in the most recent quarter, as the world’s most valuable public company continued to rake in money despite supply chain shortages that have slowed its growth.
Evergrande had a 30-day grace period on the bond payment; the extension was to end on Friday.
The payment comes a week after the world’s most indebted property developer narrowly avoided defaulting on another bond.
Weighed down by more than $300 billion of debt, Evergrande has been trying to sell off parts of its vast empire to raise enough cash to pay off creditors.
Yet if the authorities let Evergrande fail, they could hurt some of the estimated more than one million Chinese home buyers who have purchased apartments from the company and are waiting for them to be built.
First, because the bank does business with the federal government, it has an obligation to comply with President Biden’s executive order requiring vaccination for people working on government contracts.