NEW YORK —U.S. stocks closed Thursday with weekly losses as investors weighed Europe’s return to the headlines against positive weekly claims data ahead of Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report for March, which came in well below expectations.
Off 1.2 percent from last Friday’s close, the Dow Jones industrial average Thursday declined 14.61 points, or 0.1 percent, at 13,060.14.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 fell nearly 1 point to 1,398.08, or less than 0.1 percent, with a weekly drop of 0.7 percent. The Nasdaq composite added 12.41 points, or 0.4 percent, to 3,080.50, leaving it down 0.4 percent for the week.
The U.S. stock market was closed Friday.
The Labor Department reported a 120,000 increase in payrolls Friday, the smallest in five months and less than the most pessimistic estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of economists. The unemployment rate fell to 8.2 percent from 8.3 percent as people left the labor force.
Stock futures, the dollar and Treasury yields all fell as the report highlighted Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s concern that stronger economic growth is needed to keep the nation’s jobs engine humming. Friday’s data also showed that Americans worked fewer hours and earned less on average per week, boding ill for the consumer spending that makes up 70 percent of the world’s largest economy.
Given the S&P 500’s 12 percent advance in the first quarter, the market was “absolutely” in need of a pause, and concerns about Europe, and in particular Spain’s escalated borrowing costs, provided a minor catalyst, said Phil Orlando, chief equity-market strategist at Federated Investors.
But any pullback is more likely to be in the 3 percent to 5 percent range, in Orlando’s view.
“I don’t think it’ll be a 20 percent to 30 percent correction. We’re up almost 33 percent from the October bottom, and much of that rally was achieved without the participation of hedge funds and retail investors.”
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
