Wall Street Drifts at End of Week

NEW YORK (AP) -- U.S. stocks are drifting Friday as Wall Street loses momentum at the close of what looks to be its best week since November.

The S&P 500 was virtually unchanged in morning trading and potentially on track to snap a six-day winning streak. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 65 points, or 0.2%, as of 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.2% higher.

Treasury yields were holding relatively steady in the bond market following a couple mixed reports on the U.S. economy. One showed homebuilders broke ground on fewer projects last month than forecast, a bit of cold water for the market following a flurry of better-than-expected reports this week on everything from inflation to sales at U.S. retailers.

But a report later in the morning suggested U.S. consumers are feeling better about the economy than expected. That's a big deal for Wall Street because their spending makes up the bulk of the economy.

Friday's relative calm caps a manic week where strong data helped whip Wall Street around following a scary run. Stocks had been reeling the week before on a range of worries, and Japan's market dropped to its worst day since the Black Monday crash of 1987. Many of those questions are still hanging over the market, though not as precariously as before.

One concern is centered on the strength of the U.S. economy following a surprisingly weak report on hiring last month.

Even though a series of reports this week raised confidence in the economy's strength, it is still likely slowing under the weight of high interest rates. That's by design. The Federal Reserve's goal has been to cool what was a hot job market by making it more expensive for companies and households to borrow and spend. It did that that to remove upward pressure on inflation, which peaked at more than 9% two summers ago.

The question is whether the slowdown in the economy's growth will overshoot and become a recession. That's still to be determined, but the hope on Wall Street is that an expected cut to interest rates at the Fed's next meeting in September will help forestall that.

The market's focus will swing next week to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That's where Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will give a speech late in the week, and that setting has been home to hints about big policy announcements in the past.

A second big concern for the market has focused on whether investors took the prices of Nvidia and other highly influential Big Tech stocks too high in their frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology.

That debate is still ongoing. Nvidia rose 1.6% Friday and was the strongest single force pushing upward on the S&P 500. But earlier in the morning, it was down 1.4% and the heaviest weight on the market. Such swings have become typical for the stock that's become the face of the AI craze. After soaring more than 170% through the year's first six and a half months, it plunged more than 20% over the ensuing three weeks.

A third factor that's caused global markets' big swings is more technical, one triggered by a hike to interest rates by the Bank of Japan. That forced hedge funds around the world to abandon a popular trade en masse, where they had borrowed Japanese yen at cheap rates to invest elsewhere.

The forced and sudden selling that ensued hit markets worldwide, but it calmed after a top Bank of Japan official said it won't raise rates further as long as markets are unstable. But analysts say more potential selling may still be left to uncoil in the system.

On Wall Street, Advanced Materials had one of the sharper drops in the S&P 500 and fell 2.3% despite delivering a better-than-expected profit report.

On the winning side was H&R Block, which leaped 17.9% after reporting a bigger-than-expected profit for the latest quarter and increasing its dividend.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury dipped to 3.91% from 3.92% late Thursday. The two-year yield, which more closely tracks expectations for Fed action, was holding steady at 4.10%, where it was late Thursday.

In stock markets abroad, Japan's Nikkei 225 jumped 3.6% to cap its best week in more than four years.

Indexes rose 1.9% in Hong Kong and 0.1% in Shanghai after Chinese central bank governor Pan Gongsheng said in an interview with Chinese state media on Thursday that it is developing new policies aimed at supporting economic growth in the second half of the year.

Indexes were mostly higher across the rest of Asia and Europe.