US open: Stocks lower as traders digest jobless data

dl wall street wall st new york city nyc new york stock exchange nyse nasdaq trading finance us usa united states of america unsplash — Sharecast / Sophie Backes via Unsplash

Wall Street stocks were in the red early on Thursday as traders digested jobless data ahead of markets shutting up shop for the Easter long weekend.

As of 1535 BST, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.26% at 33,394.53, while the S&P 500 slipped 0.21% to 4,081.69 and the Nasdaq Composite came out the gate 0.23% weaker at 11,969.49.

The Dow opened 88.19 points lower on Thursday, reversing gains recorded in the previous session.

In focus early on Thursday, gold prices sat above $2,000 for a third straight day amid heightened fears of an oncoming recession, particularly with US job growth slowing, while the yield on the benchmark ten-year Treasury note traded slightly lower at 3.292%.

Also drawing an amount of investor attention was news that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, raising tensions between the US and China to new heights.

In terms of data, the US jobs market was a tad tighter than previously thought, according to revised weekly jobless claims from the Labor Department, which revealed that, in seasonally adjusted terms, the number of initial unemployment claims fell by 18,000 during the week ended on 1 April to hit 228,000. Economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires had forecast 200,000 claims. Significantly, the previous week's tally for first time claims was revised up by 48,000 to 246,000, while secondary unemployment claims, those referencing the week ended 25 March, edged up by 6,000 to 1.823m.

"A rising trend in claims has been a key missing part of the labor market story, but it is now clear layoffs are increasing, while other data - notably the NFIB survey - point to much slower gross hiring," said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.

Elsewhere on the macro front, job cut announcements in the States continued rising last month, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, with companies based in the US announcing 15% more job reductions in March than a year earlier at 89,703. For the entire first quarter, 270,416 job cuts had been announced, marking a nearly four-fold increase versus 2022, while March's tally was also the highest since the third quarter of 2020 - when 497,215 cuts were announced.

On another note, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis president James Bullard downplayed concerns regarding financial stress on the US economy, stating it had actually declined in recent days.

Reporting by Iain Gilbert at Sharecast.com

Dow Jones - Risers

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Amgen Inc. (AMGN) $254.30 0.37%
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JP Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM) $127.76 0.12%
Dowdupont Inc. (DWDP) $0.00 0.00%