schema:articleBody
| - Wall Street stocks rose early Friday, shrugging off data showing accelerating inflation and following strong earnings from Salesforce and other companies. A key US inflation index climbed 3.6 percent in April compared to the same month in 2020, according to government data, the largest jump since September 2008. The rise comes as economists debate whether government stimulus and loose Federal Reserve policy will cause the world's largest economy to overheat. However, the market took the data in stride, suggesting investors share "an abiding belief that the high inflation prints will be transient, as the Fed has suggested," said Briefing.com analyst Patrick O'Hare. About 30 minutes into trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.4 percent at 34,595.79. The broad-based S&P 500 gained 0.3 percent to 4,214.63, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index advanced 0.5 percent to 13,807.45. Among individual companies, Dow member Salesforce jumped 6.7 percent after the cloud computing company reported higher earnings on a 23 percent rise in revenues to $6 billion. Chief Executive Marc Benioff pointed to "incredible momentum throughout our core business." AMC Entertainment surged again, rising more than 20 percent as retail investors continued to enthuse about the movie theater chain on the Reddit social platform. jmb/hs
|