Strong overnight gains have Wall Street poised to open at record highs Thursday following the Federal Reserve's first interest rate cut in nine months.
Futures for the S&P 500 rose 0.8% before the bell, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.7%. Nasdaq futures jumped 1.1%.
Intel shares soared more than 28% after Nvidia announced it was investing $5 billion in the California chipmaker as part of a collaboration to ramp up custom data center and personal computer products. Nvidia shares rose
2.6%.
Cracker Barrel shares slid 8.2% after the restaurant chain said that it expects lower sales and weaker customer traffic in the coming year as the controversy over its planned logo change continues to play out.
In a conference call with investors on Wednesday, Cracker Barrel said traffic at its restaurants was down 1% in early August, before it announced it was adopting a more simplified logo that upset many of its loyal customers. The company eventually relented and went back to the old logo.
Walt Disney shares were largely unchanged after the entertainment giant announced that its ABC television division had suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show indefinitely after comments that he made about Charlie Kirk’s killing led a group of ABC-affiliated stations to say they would not air the show.
Earlier in the day, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr called Kimmel’s comments “truly sick” and said his agency has a strong case for holding Kimmel, ABC and network parent Walt Disney Co. accountable for spreading misinformation.
As expected on Wednesday, the Federal Reserve cut its main interest rate, but even more important was the set of projections that U.S. central bank officials published showing where they expect interest rates to go in upcoming years.
That indicated the typical member sees the Fed cutting the federal funds rate two more times by the end of this year and once more in 2026.
Markets initially rose after the rate cut announcement and projections, but quickly gave back gains after Fed Chair Jerome Powell stressed that the projections could change and warned against taking them as guarantees of future conditions.
What’s making things difficult for the Fed is that the job market is slowing as inflation is remaining stubbornly high. The Fed is in charge of fixing both, but it has only one tool to do that. And helping one by moving interest rates often hurts the other in the short term.
The Fed had been holding rates steady this year because of the threat that U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs will raise prices for all kinds of products. Inflation has so far refused to go back below the Fed’s 2% target, and Fed officials don’t see that happening for a few years.
In midday European trading, Germany's DAX and France's CAC each climbed 1.1%. Britain's FTSE 100 added 0.3% in cautious trading ahead of a Bank of England interest rate decision later in the day.
Asian shares were mixed, with Japan's Nikkei 225 closing nearly 1.2% to 45,303.43 as the Bank of Japan started its two-day policy meeting, with rates expected to be left unchanged.
South Korea's Kospi added 1.4% to 3,461.30, with chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics among advancers.
The Chinese markets were down. Hong Kong's Hang Seng slipped nearly 1.4% to 26,544.85, while the Shanghai Composite index trimmed earlier gains, losing over 1.1% to 3,831.66.
Australia's S&P/ASX 200 dipped 0.8% to 8,745.20 with data released Thursday showing the jobless rate was unchanged at 4.2% in August, but headline employment fell by 5,400 while full-time jobs declined by 40,900.
India's BSE Sensex was up 0.1%, while Taiwan's Taiex added 1.3%.
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