Stocks ended mostly higher Friday and bond yields spiked after a robust October jobs report increased the odds that the Federal Reserve will finally pull the trigger and raise interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade at its next meeting in December. Despite the S&P 500 sinking fractionally on Friday to just under 2100, all three major indexes posted their sixth straight week of gains. For the day, the Dow Jones industrial average gained 47 points, or 0.3%, to 17,910, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 0.4% to 5147.
For the week, the Dow was up about 1.4% and the S&P 500 gained 1%. The Nasdaq jumped 1.8%. The government reported Friday that 271,000 jobs were created in October, easily beating economists’ expectations of 182,000 jobs, according to Bloomberg. The unemployment rate fell to 5.0% from 5.1% in September, its lowest level since April 2008.
The “employment report blew expectations out of the water,” said Michael Dolega, senior economist at TD Economics. “The report suggests the U.S. economic recovery has hardly skipped a beat despite the many external headwinds, with weakness largely constrained to the manufacturing and mining sectors.”
Fed Chair Janet Yellen called a December rate hike a “live possibility” at a congressional hearing on Wednesday and the strong employment figures have many economists forecasting a rate hike before the end of the year. The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond surged after the report, jumping as high 2.35% from 2.23% late Thursday. “The much bigger than expected 271,000 surge in non-farm payrolls in October confirms that the weakness in August and September was just a temporary blip and, given the circumstances, a December interest rate hike would now appear to be the most likely outcome,” said Capital Economics chief U.S. economist Paul Ashworth.