By Caroline Valetkevitch and Lawrence White
NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) -Most stock indexes edged higher on Friday and Wall Street was set to post gains for the week, while the dollar headed for its first weekly rise in over a month, as signs of an easing in the U.S.-China trade war offered solace to investors.
Helping Wall Street, shares of Google parent Alphabet were up 1.7% after it beat profit expectations and reaffirmed AI spending targets.
Uncertainty surrounding the impacts of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff offensive and the resulting global trade tensions have dominated earnings calls this results season.
In a positive development, however, China exempted some products from its steep tariffs on U.S. imports, though Beijing knocked down Trump’s assertion that trade negotiations were under way.
Tit-for-tat tariffs that began with Trump’s announcement of hefty import levies on April 2 had threatened to stall trade between the world’s two biggest economies and sparked fears of a slowdown in global growth.
“This week you’ve seen kind of relief that maybe some of the worst-case of the Trump tariff actions won’t come true,” said Chip Rewey, CIO of Rewey Asset Management, a registered investment advisor based in New Jersey.
“While we’ve recovered from some of the lows, we haven’t pushed back to highs. And I think somewhere in that range is where we’ll stay for a while.”
The S&P 500 was set to gain for the week, while Europe’s STOXX 600 rose more than 2% on the week.
Investors also digested a Time magazine interview with Trump where he said high tariffs on foreign imports a year from now would represent “total victory”.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 132.71 points, or 0.33%, to 39,960.69, the S&P 500 rose 4.96 points, or 0.09%, to 5,489.56 and the Nasdaq Composite rose 55.24 points, or 0.32%, to 17,221.29.
MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe rose 1.54 points, or 0.19%, to 821.40. The pan-European STOXX 600 index rose 0.35%.
In Japan, the Nikkei was up 1.8% on Friday and has regained all its losses since Trump’s announcement of the highest U.S. tariffs in 100 years – levies he largely suspended, except for China and a baseline tariff of 10%.
The dollar, which has taken a beating through a volatile few weeks of tariff announcements, reversals and a flight out of U.S. assets, was up slightly against the euro and yen.
The dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies including the yen and the euro, rose 0.05% to 99.47, with the euro down 0.04% at $1.1384. Against the Japanese yen, the dollar strengthened 0.77% to 143.72.
Gold prices, which have soared this year as investors sought safe haven assets decoupled from the dollar, were last down 1.94% at $3,283.21 an ounce on Friday.
U.S. crude rose 0.19% to $62.91 a barrel and Brent rose to $66.71 per barrel, up 0.24% on the day.
The yield on benchmark U.S. 10-year notes fell 4.9 basis points to 4.257%, from 4.305% late on Thursday.
(Additional reporting by Tom Westbrook in Singapore; Editing by Saad Sayeed, Kate Mayberry, Aidan Lewis and Joe Bavier)
