US stocks closed higher today after Wall Street found relief in Beijing’s efforts to halt a rout in Chinese stocks, which lifted markets around the world.
Shares of Apple bucked the market and logged their first five-day losing streak since January as investors worried that consumers in China might have less money to spend on iPhones.
Wall Street had fallen sharply in the previous session as market turmoil in China, a rout in commodity prices, the Greek debt crisis and a major outage on the New York Stock Exchange spooked investors.
China’s securities regulator, in its most drastic step yet to arrest a selloff on Chinese stock markets, banned shareholders with large stakes in listed firms from selling for the next six months.
About 30 percent has been knocked off the value of Chinese shares since mid-June. Some investors fear that the turmoil in the Chinese market could destabilize the global financial system, making it a bigger risk than the Greek crisis.
Adding to cautious optimism on Wall Street, European markets rose on hopes that Greece might be able to win a deal that could keep it in the euro zone. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has until midnight to propose spending cut plans.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 33.2 points, or 0.19 percent, to end at 17,548.62. The S&P 500 gained 4.63 points, or 0.23 percent, to 2,051.31 and the Nasdaq Composite added 12.64 points, or 0.26 percent, to 4,922.40.
Meanwhile, European shares rose supported by miners after a rally in metals and Chinese stocks, while some investors were betting Greece’s creditors will look positively at reform proposals and finally agree a debt deal.
The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index closed 2.3 percent up at 1,511.64 points. The euro zone’s Euro STOXX 50 index added 2.8 percent, while Germany’s DAX advanced 2.3 percent and Spain’s IBEX gained 2.7 percent. Italy’s FTSE MIB enjoyed its best day since early January, climbing 3.5 percent.
In Asia earlier, Japanese stocks ended up pulling back from 3-month lows in volatile trade as China’s markets stemmed their rout after Beijing slapped curbs on selling in the latest of a flurry of emergency measures to avert a full-blown crisis.
The Nikkei average rose 0.6 percent to 19,855.50 after falling as much as 3.2 percent to 19,115.20 in the morning.
Source: Buenos Aires Herald