The price of the 10-year Treasury note dropped 12.5 cents for every $100 invested. The yield edged up to 1.94 percent from 1.93 percent late Monday. Shorter-dated Treasurys were nearly all unchanged.
BY DANIEL WAGNER
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Dow Jones industrial average rode a surge of confidence in the economy Tuesday to close above 13,000, a threshold it last crossed four months before the financial crisis of 2008 and the darkest days of the Great Recession.
The milestone extended a strong rally in stocks since the start of the year, and it came after a fitful week in which the Dow repeatedly floated above 13,000 only to fall back by the end of the trading day.
The Dow closed at 13,005.12, a close enough call that the gain of a single stock, Johnson & Johnson, made the difference. The Dow last closed above 13,000 in May 2008, four months before the fall of the Lehman Brothers investment bank and the worst of the crisis.
“I think it’s a momentous day for investor confidence,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank. “What this number implies is that the financial crisis that we were all losing sleep over, it never happened, because now we’re back.”
Dow 13,000 comes at a time when Americans are feeling better about the economy than they have in a year. The Conference Board, a private research group, said its consumer confidence jumped to 70.8 in February, up from 61.5 in January.
The report came out at 10 a.m. and lifted the Dow above 13,000. It stayed there most of the day.
“Two months ago, we were talking about a double-dip recession. Now consumer confidence is growing,” said Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist for Schaffer’s Investment Research.
He said the Dow’s milestone “wakes up a lot of investors who have missed a lot of this rally.”
The average first pierced 13,000 last Tuesday but fell back by the close. It floated above the milestone again Friday and Monday, but slipped below both days. A strong rally for stocks this year seemed stalled as worry built on Wall Street about climbing prices for oil and gasoline.
Tuesday’s gain puts the Dow 1,160 points below its all-time high, set Oct. 9, 2007. The Great Recession began two months later.
The milestone could draw some fence-sitting investors back into the market and add to the gains, said Brian Gendreau, market strategist at Cetera Financial Group.
“Already here in the first two months, we’ve blown past the consensus expectations for the entire year, and that certainly gets people’s attention,” he said.
The Dow started with its best January since 1997 and has added to that gain. The index is up 6.5 percent for the young year.
Other averages have fared even better: The Standard & Poor’s 500 is up 9 percent, the Russell 2000 index of smaller stocks is up 11 percent, and the Nasdaq composite index, dominated by technology stocks, is up 14 percent.
The other major indexes sit at multiyear highs as well. The S&P closed Tuesday at its highest level since June 2008, and the Nasdaq has not traded so high since December 2000, during the bursting of the bubble in technology stocks.
The S&P 500 gained 4.59 points Tuesday and closed at 1,372.18. Technical traders said it was a breakthrough because the S&P has been hemmed between 1,100 and 1,370 for months.
The Nasdaq gained 20.60 and closed at 2,986.76.
The price of the 10-year Treasury note dropped 12.5 cents for every $100 invested. The yield edged up to 1.94 percent from 1.93 percent late Monday. Shorter-dated Treasurys were nearly all unchanged.