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.
Stocks end mixed as traders fret
June 10, 2008 at 2:00AM
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 J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Soaring energy prices, as well as a huge jump in the unemployment rate, sent the Dow Jones industrial average plunging nearly 400 points on 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 Monday, but only after Friday's $11-a-barrel surge to a new record.
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 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.
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The medtech company with roughly 10,000 Minnesota employees reported annual revenue exceeding $16 billion.
