Last week saw record highs on Wall Street. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index topped a sixth year of the bull market while the Nasdaq Composite Index surpassed 5,000 for the first time in 15 years. At the same time, Apple Inc., the world’s largest company by market value, was listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
None of this stopped benchmarks from scoring their worst week since January, as concern rose that the monetary stimulus that helped equities triple from March 2009 will soon be over, after a surge in hiring fired speculation that the Federal Reserve will raise borrowing costs this year. The S&P 500 lost 1.6 percent in the five days, trimming its gain in 2015 to 0.6 percent.
“It’s definitely been a week of milestones,” Russ Koesterich, the New York-based chief investment strategist at BlackRock, said in a phone interview. “People are obviously taking a pause as valuations aren’t cheap. This is all about rates. The ultra-dovish view that it won’t happen until next year is much less likely.”
The S&P 500 tumbled 1.4 percent in the final session of the week after data showed employers added 295,000 workers to payrolls in February, more than expected, and the unemployment rate dropped to 5.5 percent, the lowest in almost seven years.
The Fed now considers the jobless rate to be in the range of full employment, keeping policy makers on course to raise interest rates this year as continued job growth leads to an increase in wages.
Fed bond-buying
What seems to have helped the S&P 500 rally more than 200 percent since its bear-market low on March 9, 2009 are the three rounds of Fed bond-buying and near-zero interest rates. The current bull market, lasting almost 2,200 days, is closing in on overtaking the 1974-1980 run as the third longest since 1929.
The Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.7 percent by the end of the week after jumping above 5,000 on March 2. Nine straight quarters of gains led by a 70 percent surge in Apple elevated the index within 1 percent of its all-time high of 5,048.62 reached March 10, 2000.
“If you’re a believer that part of the reason the equity markets have done so well is driven largely by the Fed’s easy money policy, then your interpretation is that a rise in interest rates could slow down the equity markets,” Randy Frederick, managing director of trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab Corp., said by phone from Austin, Texas. “I don’t think this will end the bull market, I do think this could cause a correction.”