Wall St inches higher in volatile trade following Fed minutes

By Caroline Valetkevitch

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. stocks edged higher in choppy trading Wednesday following the release of minutes from the last Federal Reserve meeting, which showed policymakers agreed they needed to maintain a more restrictive policy stance.

The minutes of the September meeting showed many Fed officials stressed the cost of not doing enough to bring down inflation.

At the September meeting, Fed officials raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point for the third straight time in an effort to drive inflation down from 40-year highs.

Rate-sensitive financials were up 0.8%.

Stocks were mostly flat just before the release of the minutes.

“For the most part there’s nothing too earth-shattering in the Fed minutes. The fact they’re saying that there is more of a risk doing too little than doing too much maybe reinforces the idea that they’re more likely to continue to raise rates at a quick pace,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at Independent Advisor Alliance in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Data earlier in the day showed a surprise rise in September producer prices. The Labor Department’s producer prices index rose 8.5% in the 12 months through September, slightly higher than an estimated 8.4% rise. Still, the reading was lower than an 8.7% increase in August.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 120.31 points, or 0.41%, to 29,359.5, the S&P 500 gained 7.58 points, or 0.21%, to 3,596.42 and the Nasdaq Composite added 32.19 points, or 0.31%, to 10,458.38.

There have been increasing fears among investors that aggressive rate hikes by the Fed could tip the world’s largest economy into a recession.

(Additional reporting by Ankika Biswas, Shreyashi Sanyal & Bansari Mayur Kamdar in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva, Arun Koyyur and Deepa Babington)

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