NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are hanging near record highs Monday after the United States agreed to tax cars and other products coming from the European Union at a 15% rate, lower than President Donald Trump had earlier threatened. Many details are still to be worked out, however, and Wall Street is heading into a week full of potential flashpoints that could shake markets.
The S&P 500 added another 0.1% in early trading after setting an all-time high every day last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 19 points, or less than 0.1%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite is 0.3% higher, coming off its own record.
Stocks of U.S. companies that produce and move liquefied natural gas helped drive the market after the head of the European Commission said the bloc’s members would buy $750 billion of U.S. energy products over the next three years. That would help lessen Europe’s reliance on Russia for natural gas. Cheniere Energy climbed 4.2%, while NextDecade rose 3.4%.
Tesla added 0.2% after its CEO, Elon Musk, said it signed a deal with Samsung Electronics that could be worth more than $16.5 billion to provide chips for the electric-vehicle company. Samsung’s stock in South Korea jumped 6.8%.
Many more fireworks may be ahead this week. “This is about as busy as a week can get in the markets,” according to Chris Larkin, managing director, trading and investing, at E-Trade from Morgan Stanley.
Hundreds of U.S. companies are lined up and ready to report how much profit they made during the spring, with nearly a third of all the businesses in the S&P 500 index scheduled to deliver updates. That includes market heavyweights Apple, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Microsoft. Those companies have grown so huge that their stock movements can almost solely dictate what the overall S&P 500 index does. Microsoft alone is worth roughly $3.8 trillion,
On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve will announce its latest decision on interest rates.
Trump has been loudly and angrily calling for the Fed to cut interest rates, a move that could help give the economy a boost. But Fed Chair Jerome Powell has been insisting that he wants to wait for more data about how Trump’s tariffs are affecting the economy and inflation before the Fed makes its next move. Lower interest rates also can give inflation more fuel, and the economy only recently came out of its scarring run where inflation briefly topped 9%.
The widespread expectation on Wall Street is that the Fed will wait until September to resume cutting interest rates, though a couple of Trump’s appointees could dissent in the vote. The Fed has been on hold with interest rates this year since cutting them several times at the end of 2024.
This week will also feature several potentially market-moving updates about the economy. On Tuesday will come reports on how confident U.S. consumers are feeling and how many jobs openings U.S. employers were advertising. Wednesday will show the first estimate of how quickly the U.S. economy grew during the spring, and economists expect to see a slowdown from the first three months of the year.
On Thursday, the latest measure of inflation that the Federal Reserve prefers to use will arrive. A modest reading could give the Fed more leeway to cut interest rates in the short term, while a hotter-than-expected figure could make it more cautious.
And Friday will bring an update on how many more workers U.S. employers hired during June than they fired.
Treasury yields held relatively steady in the bond market ahead of all that action. The yield on the 10-year Treasury was remaining at 4.40%, where it was late Friday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for Fed action, edged up to 3.92% from 3.91%.
In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed in Europe amid mostly modest movements following the announcement of the trade deal’s framework.
Chinese stocks rose as officials from the world’s second-largest economy prepare to meet with a U.S. delegation in Sweden for trade talks. Stocks climbed 0.7% in Hong Kong and 0.1% in Shanghai.
Indexes were mixed across the rest of Asia, where Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 1.1% for one of the world’s bigger losses. Doubts surfaced over what exactly last week’s trade truce between Japan and Trump entails, especially Japan’s $550 billion pledge of investment in the U.S.
Terms of the deal are still being negotiated, and nothing has been formalized in writing, said an official who insisted on anonymity to detail the terms of the talks. The official suggested the goal was for a $550 billion fund to make investments at Trump’s direction.
