NEW YORK — Stocks closed mixed Monday, with Wall Street exhausted from last week’s swoon and still nervous about the effect of bank losses and energy costs on the economy.
A pullback in crude-oil prices provided only limited relief to investors, who largely stuck to the stocks of large companies. Blue chips are regarded as safer assets during times of economic uncertainty.
“It’s hard for anyone to jump in whole-hog after Friday,” said Thomas J. Lee, equities analyst at JPMorgan.
Soaring energy prices, as well as a huge jump in the unemployment rate, sent the Dow Jones industrial average plunging nearly 400 points Friday.
“I think everyone’s going to watch oil, and I think it’s going to paralyze us for a while,” Lee said.
Crude prices dipped more than $4 to settle at $134.35 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Monday but only after Friday’s $11-a- barrel surge to a record. With U.S. gasoline topping $4 a gallon, consumers’ ballooning energy bills could force them to keep paring back spending on other items.
The financial sector was particularly weak Monday, after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. posted an unexpectedly large quarterly loss of $2.8 billion — the investment bank’s first since it spun off from American Express Co. in 1994. The poor performance added to uncertainty about how long it will take banks to recover from the mortgage market’s near collapse.
“The financials are a key factor in today’s market. It almost seems we’re stuck in this range, trying to figure out when the end of this whole financial crisis is over,” said Anthony Conroy, managing director and head trader for BNY ConvergEx Group.
The Dow rose 70.51, or 0.58 percent, to 12,280.32 after Friday’s rout, which was the worst tumble on Wall Street in 15 months.
Broader stock indicators finished mixed. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 1.08, or 0.08 percent, to 1,361.76, while the Nasdaq composite index fell 15.10, or 0.61 percent, to 2,459.46.
The cost of commodities, driven partly by the weakening dollar, has been raising worries about inflation. Dallas Federal Reserve president Richard Fisher and New York Fed president Timothy Geithner in speeches Monday cited rising costs and the declining dollar as major concerns.
European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Tri chet reiterated that the ECB might hike rates at its July meeting to control inflation.
