NEW YORK (AFP) – Wall Street stocks rallied on Tuesday (Dec 21), bouncing following three down sessions after US President Joe Biden unveiled steps to contain Covid-19 and expressed optimism about his domestic agenda.
In a televised address, the President formally announced a raft of new measures to combat the winter Covid-19 surge, including shipping half a billion at home tests, while imploring unvaccinated Americans to get jabbed.
Mr Biden also said he remains hopeful he can secure Senate passage of his US$1.75 trillion (S$2.39 trillion) Build Back Better plan, and believes he can ultimately win support from crucial Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who said on Sunday that he would vote "no" on the current incarnation of the proposal.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished up 1.6 per cent at 35,492.70.
The broad-based S&P 500 jumped 1.8 per cent to 4,649.23, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index gained 2.4 per cent to 15,341.09.
"Investors want to be optimistic leading up to the holidays and lawmakers on Capitol Hill will not want to be painted the villain, so all the rhetoric will likely be upbeat for the rest of the week," Oanda's Edward Moya, said following Mr Biden's comments on the legislation's prospects.
Mr Art Hogan, chief strategist at National Securities, said stocks were primed to go up after recent weakness, adding: "I don't know that there's much of a catalyst other than that we were oversold."
Among individual companies, Nike jumped 6.1 per cent after reporting better-than-expected profits as strong pricing offset a hit from supply chain outages on product availability.
Micron Technology surged 10.5 per cent as it scored a 33 per cent increase in revenues to US$7.7 billion amid strong demand driven by the push for 5G telecommunications and electric vehicles.
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