ASX set for gains as Wall Street rises on jobs surprise

7 hours ago 2

By Stan Choe

July 4, 2025 — 5.16am

US stocks climbed further into record heights after a report showed the US job market looks stronger than Wall Street expected.

The S&P 500 rose 0.8 per cent and set an all-time high for the fourth time in five days. The Dow Jones added 344 points, or 0.8 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite gained 1 per cent.

Wall Street climbed to another record on Thursday.

The Australian sharemarket is set to rise, with futures at 4.53am AEST pointing to a rise of 26 points, or 0.3 per cent, at the open. The ASX closed flat on Thursday. The Australian dollar is weaker. It was 0.2 per cent lower at 65.69 US cents at 5.14am.

The market’s gains were widespread, and companies whose profits can get the biggest boosts when workers are feeling confident helped lead the way. Expedia climbed 3.2 per cent, and Norwegian Cruise Line steamed 2.9 per cent higher.

Bank stocks were also strong, with Citigroup up 2.3 per cent, and JPMorgan Chase up 1.9 per cent.

The reaction was bigger in the bond market following the report from the US government, which said employers added 147,000 more jobs to their payrolls last month than they cut. The unexpected acceleration in hiring signals the US job market is holding up despite worries about how President Donald Trump’s tariffs may hurt the economy and inflation.

“There is nothing to complain about here,” according to Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics. “You cannot find any evidence of a nascent recession in these figures.”

A separate report, meanwhile, said fewer US workers applied for unemployment benefits last week, an indication of easing layoffs.

Yields jumped in the bond market as investors bet the better-than-expected data could keep the Federal Reserve on hold when it comes to interest rates, instead of cutting them like Trump has loudly been calling for.

Traders in the futures market now see less than a 5 per cent chance that the Fed could cut its main interest rate at its next meeting later this month. That’s down sharply from the nearly 24 per cent chance they saw just a day earlier, according to data from CME Group.

The Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell, has been insisting that he wants to wait and see how Trump’s tariffs affect the economy and inflation before making its next move. While lower rates give a boost to the economy by making it easier to borrow money, they can also give inflation more fuel. And that could be dangerous if Trump’s tariffs are about to send inflation higher.

Many of Trump’s stiff proposed taxes on imports are currently on pause, but they’re scheduled to kick in next week unless Trump reaches deals with other countries to lower them.

Many US companies in the services industries are still saying they’re concerned about the impacts of tariffs, even if they returned to growth last month following May’s contraction, according to the most recent survey by the Institute for Supply Management.

“Increased cost from tariffs and the potential for tariffs is impacting cost increases,” one company in the agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting industry said in the survey.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.34 per cent from 4.30 per cent late on Wednesday. The two-year Treasury yield, which moves more closely with expectations for the Fed, jumped even more. It climbed to 3.88 per cent from 3.78 per cent.

On Wall Street, Datadog rallied 14.9 per cent after learning that its stock will join the widely followed S&P 500 index before trading begins on Wednesday. Many managers of funds either directly mimic or at least compare themselves against the S&P 500, which drives investment into any stock that joins the index.

Datadog will replace Juniper Networks, which combined with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in a merger.

On the losing side of Wall Street were companies that can feel pain from interest rates staying high.

Homebuilders would like rates to fall in order to make mortgages cheaper to get, for example, and Lennar sank 4.1 per cent, while D.R. Horton dropped 2.7 per cent.

All told, the S&P 500 rose 51.93 points to 6,279.35. The Dow Jones added 344.11 to 44,828.53, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 207.97 to 20,601.10.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe and Asia. South Korea’s Kospi climbed 1.3 per cent, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.6 per cent for two of the bigger moves.