U.s. Stocks-index Gains

U.S. stock futures rose after government reports showed the number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits fell last week while worker productivity increased. Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. climbed at least 0.9 percent after the Labor Department’s report signaled the most acute phase of job losses may be over. Exxon Mobil Corp. and Schlumberger Ltd. climbed more than 0.6 percent, leading an advance in energy producers, as oil jumped 2.5 percent on a prediction from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that crude may reach $85 a barrel by the end of the year. Futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index expiring this month added 0.4 percent to 935.20 at 8:52 a.m. in New York. The benchmark measure for U.S. equities has rallied 38 percent from a 12-year low on March 9 on optimism the global recession is slowing. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures rose 0.4 percent to 8,707, while Nasdaq-100 Index futures increased 0.2 percent to 1,479.75. “At the moment you have lead indicators picking up and that is enough to get the markets rallying,” said Trevor Greetham, head of asset allocation at Fidelity International Ltd., which had $141 billion in assets under management at the end of March. “For that to be sustainable you do need to see a follow-through to an above-trend rate of growth.” London-based Greetham moved to “overweight” equities “very recently” in his multiasset portfolios, he told Bloomberg Television. S&P 500’s Rebound The S&P 500’s rebound since March 9 also comes as the biggest U.S. banks said they were profitable last quarter, President Barack Obama outlined a $787 billion plan to revive the economy and the Treasury unveiled plans to finance as much as $1 trillion in purchases of lenders’ troubled assets. Initial jobless claims fell by 4,000 to 621,000 in the week ended May 30, in line with forecasts, from a revised 625,000 the prior week, the government said. The number of people collecting unemployment insurance fell for the first time in almost five months, breaking a string of 17 consecutive records. U.S. worker productivity rose more in the first quarter than previously estimated as the worst recession in at least half a century prompted companies to cut costs by extracting more output from remaining employees. Productivity, a measure of worker output per hour, climbed at a 1.6 percent annual rate, more than forecast and double the 0.8 percent gain estimated last month, revised figures from the Labor Department showed today. Labor costs increased 3 percent after climbing 5.1 percent at the end of 2008. About two-thirds of companies in the S&P 500 that have published earnings since April 7 beat analysts’ projections, Bloomberg data show. Profits are expected to fall 16 percent

this year before rebounding 25 percent in 2010, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg. http://globalstocks.wordpress,com