NEW YORK, June 12 (Xinhua) -- U.S. stocks posted mixed weekly results as investors digested latest data to assess the shape of the economic recovery.
For the week ending Friday, the Dow dipped 0.8 percent, snapping a two-week win streak. The S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite rose 0.4 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively.
The S&P U.S. Listed China 50 index, which is designed to track the performance of the 50 largest Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges by total market cap, logged a weekly decline of 1 percent.
A key inflation report showed a bigger-than-expected increase in price pressures in the United States, grabbing Wall Street's attention.
The headline Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.6 percent in May for a 5.0-percent year-over-year gain, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Thursday, above the 4.7-percent consensus.
That marks the largest 12-month increase since a 5.4-percent increase for the period ending August 2008, according to the report.
The core CPI, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.7 percent for a 3.8 percent yearly increase, also above market consensus.
For months, the annual core CPI had been below 2 percent, the central bank's inflation target, until April, when it saw a 3.0-percent 12-month increase.
"There's plenty of evidence this was another month of transitory increases, but the Fed's patience will be tested yet again at the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) meeting next week," Chris Low and Will Compernolle, economists at FHN Financial, said in a note on Thursday.
The Fed has pledged to keep its benchmark interest rates unchanged at the record-low level of near zero, while continuing its asset purchase program at least at the current pace of 120 billion U.S. dollars per month, until the economic recovery makes "substantial further progress."
Inflation has been a focus on Wall Street recently, even as Fed officials have repeatedly tamped down fears of inflation running persistently higher than its 2-percent target, while signaling they have tools to keep it under control.
Investors in financial assets like stocks and bonds are always worried about inflation, because it erodes the buying power of whatever money they make on those investments.
"As we move forward from here, my cautionary advice to investors would be that just as everyone starts to ignore or write off inflation for good, that's when you should perk up and watch for rising inflation and rising interest rates," Mitch Zacks, CEO at Zacks Investment Management, said in a note on Saturday.
"As the economy recovers it is essential that investors keep an eye on key data points that could impact their long-term investments," he said.
On the other economic front, U.S. initial jobless claims, a rough way to measure layoffs, decreased by 9,000 to 376,000 in the week ending June 5, marking a fresh pandemic-era low, the Department of Labor reported on Thursday. Enditem
