US stocks power within 3% of their record as Wall Street closes out a winning week

NEW YORK AP Wall Street cruised to the finish of its strong week on Friday as U S stocks glided closer to the all-time high they set just a limited months earlier though it may feel like an economic era ago The S P rose for a fifth straight gain and closed out its third winning week in the last four It s rallied back within of its record set in February after briefly dropping roughly below last month thanks to building hopes that President Donald Trump will lower his tariffs against other countries after reaching contract deals with them The Dow Jones Industrial Average added points or and the Nasdaq composite climbed Trump s contract war had sent financial markets reeling worldwide because of twin dangers On one hand tariffs could slow the economic activity and drive it into a recession On the other tariffs could push inflation higher This week featured specific encouraging news on each of those fronts The United States and China declared a -day stand-down in largest part of their punishing tariffs against each other while a couple reports on inflation in the United States came in better than economists expected It was a week to remember according to economists at Bank of America led by Claudio Irigoyen and Antonio Gabriel But they also revealed they re not expecting a important drop in volatility and they re not changing big-picture forecasts There is still huge uncertainty regarding the impact of tariffs on economic activity and inflation they mentioned in a BofA Global Research overview That uncertainty has been hitting U S households and businesses raising worries that they may freeze their spending and long-term plans in response which would hurt the financial sector The latest reading in a survey of U S consumers by the University of Michigan exhibited sentiment soured again in May though the pace of decline wasn t as bad as in prior months Perhaps more worryingly expectations for coming inflation keep building and U S consumers are now bracing for in the next months according to the University of Michigan s preliminary survey results That s up from a forecast of a month before When everyone expects inflation to be high it could kick off a vicious cycle of behavior that only worsens inflation To be sure only specific of the University of Michigan s survey responses for the preliminary May reading came after the United States and China declared their -day truce On Wall Street Charter Communications rose after it reported it agreed to merge with Cox Communications in a deal that would combine two of the country s largest cable companies The resulting company will change its name to Cox Communications and keep Charter s headquarters in Stamford Connecticut CoreWeave jumped after Nvidia disclosed that it had increased its ownership stake in the company whose cloud platform helps customers running artificial-intelligence workloads Nvidia now owns of CoreWeave up from its nearly stake before CoreWeave s initial inhabitants offering of stock in March Novo Nordisk s stock that trades in the United States fell after the Danish company behind the Wegovy drug for weight loss declared that Lars Fruergaard J rgensen will step down as CEO and that the board is looking for his successor The company cited up-to-date sphere challenges and how the stock has been performing in recent weeks All communicated the S P rose points to The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed to and the Nasdaq composite gained to In the bond industry Treasury yields held relatively steady The yield on the -year Treasury edged down to from late Thursday and from more than the day before that Lower bond yields can encourage investors to pay higher prices for stocks and other investments The two-year Treasury yield which more closely tracks expectations for action by the Federal Reserve rose to from It had been as low as earlier in the morning before the release of the University of Michigan s survey Hope remains that this week s better-than-expected signals on inflation could give the Federal Reserve more leeway to cut interest rates later this year if high tariffs drag down the U S financial system In stock markets abroad indexes rose modestly in Europe after finishing mixed in Asia Tokyo s Nikkei inched down by less than after the regime published that Japan s financial system contracted at a faster rate than expected in the first quarter of the year AP Writers Jiang Junzhe and Matt Ott contributed Source