Investing.com – Wall Street traded broadly higher on Monday as market participants looked ahead to Federal Reserve (Fed) chair Janet Yellen’s take on Friday’s employment report and the economy in general to search for clues on when the U.S. central bank could make the next move for normalization of monetary policy.
At 15:32GMT or 11:32AM ET, the Dow 30 gained 113 points, or 0.63%, the S&P 500 rose 10 points, or 0.49%, while the tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite traded up 21 points, or 0.43%.
In a session with no major macro data, Yellen was scheduled to give the last Fed speech before the blackout period begins for the Fed’s policy meeting on June 14-15.
Set to speak on the economy and monetary policy to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia at on Monday at 16:30GMT, or 12:30ET, Yellen was expected to assess the May employment report which caused waves on Friday after the creation of 38,000 nonfarm payrolls (NFP) settled far below consensus expectations.
Since the release of the jobs data, three separate Fed members that having voting rights in policy meetings had chimed in on the data.
Fed governor Lael Brainard said on Friday that the balance of the employment report showed the labor market had slowed and expressed her opinion that the Fed should wait to hike rates.
However, Cleveland Fed president Loretta Mester suggested over the weekend that you cannot reach a conclusion from one data point, adding that “the weak employment number has not changed fundamentally my economic outlook”.
Boston Fed chief Eric Rosengren also said Monday that, while disappointing, it was important to see whether the data was an anomaly or truly reflected a broader slowing of the labor market.
Outside the voting circle, Atlanta Fed president Dennis Lockhart said that the slowdown could be a natural result of the U.S. economy nearing full employment, but added in the interview with Bloomberg that he saw no cost in being “patient” on interest rates “until the July meeting at least”.
In any case, traders look forward to Yellen’s own assessment of the data and the current state of the economy for hints on whether her view on the future path of policy normalization had changed.
Ahead of the appearance, Fed fund futures priced in only a 6% chance of a rate hike at the June meeting.
According to the CME Group tool, markets had taken July off the table as well, with the probability for the next increase not passing the 50% threshold until the September 21 decision at 52%.
Meanwhile, oil prices rose towards an eight-month high in North American trade on Monday, as investors shifted their focus back to global supply outages.
Concerns over a disruption to Nigerian supplies escalated after the Niger Delta Avengers militant group claimed responsibility for three new attacks on the country's oil infrastructure over the weekend, promising to cut production to zero.
U.S. crude futures gained 2.22% to $49.70 by 15:35GMT, or 11:35ET, while Brent oil traded up 1.89% to $50.58.
In company news, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Google’s appeal to throw out a class action suit claiming that the Internet giant had deceived advertisers about placement of ads. Google’s parent Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) slipped 0.4%
Devon Energy Corporation (NYSE:DVN) jumped more than 4% after announcing the sale of nearly $1 billion worth of assets in Texas.
BlackRock Inc (NYSE:BLK) rose more than 1% after selling a Singapore 43-story office building for $2.5 billion in what was the biggest single-tower real estate sale in the Asia-Pacific.