Stocks kept investors on edge for most of Thursday, swinging between positive and negative territory throughout the session as investors sized up global central bank headlines.
Kicking things off was an early morning decision from the European Central Bank (ECB) to hike its key interest rate by an unprecedented 75 basis points. A basis point is one one-hundredth of a percentage point.
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"Stuck between a rock and a hard place, ECB policymakers felt they had little option but to go ultra-big with the rate rise to try and cut the rope on inflation and spark a fall from its ascent," says Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. She adds that it couldn't have come at a worse time. "With energy prices so elevated, bringing an end to the price spiral is going to be far from easy, and the ECB is warning that fresh hikes will be on the way."
Back at home, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell this morning doubled down on the hawkish tone he struck in a late-August speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Speaking during a virtual conference hosted by the Cato Institute, Powell indicated that the Fed is firmly committed to fighting inflation and will be as aggressive as it needs to be in order to do that. "It is very much our view, and my view, that we need to act now forthrightly, strongly, as we have been doing, and we need to keep at it until the job is done," he said.
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These two events sparked a wild ride for investors, but at the close, the major market indexes were in the green. The Dow Jones
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