American equities post modest weekly gains

NEW YORK: US stocks eked out modest gains in the past week as Wall Street digested the Federal Reserve's meeting minutes and a slew of economic data.

For the week ending Friday, the Dow was roughly unchanged, the S&P 500 rose 0.7 per cent, and the Nasdaq gained 2.7 per cent, Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday.

The S&P US Listed China 50 index, which is designed to track the performance of the 50 largest Chinese companies listed on US exchanges by total market cap, logged a weekly rise of 2.8 per cent.

It was a big week for Apple as the tech giant hit a market cap of US $2 trillion on Wednesday to become the first publicly traded US company to reach the milestone. With the new achievement, Apple doubled its valuation in about two years.

The US central bank on Wednesday released the minutes from its July meeting, highlighting uncertainty over the economy.

"Members agreed that the ongoing public health crisis would weigh heavily on economic activity, employment, and inflation in the near term and was posing considerable risks to the economic outlook over the medium term," said the minutes.

While reaffirming its commitment to using full range of tools to support the US economy during this challenging time, the Fed noted the path of the economy would depend significantly on the course of the virus.

The Fed slashed interest rates to near zero earlier this year in an effort to support the economy amid the pandemic shock.

Confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States hit over 5.65 million and deaths topped 176,000 as of Saturday afternoon, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. (IANS)

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