“It is potentially quite meaningful for the banks,” said Tony Roth, chief investment officer at Wilmington Trust.
The S&P 500 added 33.43 points to 3,083.76. The benchmark index is on pace for its best quarter since the fourth quarter of 1998. The Commerce Department said Thursday that the U.S. economy shrank at a 5% rate in the first three months of the year. A far worse decline is expected for the current quarter due to the pandemic.The Labor Department said another 1.5 million laid-off workers applied for unemployment benefits last week. That marks the 12th straight drop, a sign that layoffs are slowing, but remain at a painfully high level.
The mixed data come amid growing alarm over a surge in cases of COVID-19. Hospitalizations and caseloads have hit new highs in over a half-dozen U.S. states, including California, Florida and Texas, where the governor on Thursday said the state would pause its aggressive reopening as it deals with a surge in cases and people in need of being hospitalized. The daily number of confirmed cases in the country closed in on the peak reached in late April.
President Donald Trump had campaigned in 2016 on rolling back what he saw as excessive over-regulation of the banks that had weighed on the economy by preventing the banks from making loans to qualified borrowers.