U.S. stocks moved higher Thursday following European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi’s announcement that the ECB will embark on a bond buying program in the near future.
The announcement came about 10 a.m. East Coast time and immediately sent the Dow soaring by almost 200 points.
The ECB’s program will see an open-ended, monthly purchase of 60 billion euros (about $70 billion) in public and private bond-buying. Draghi hopes this action will boost the Euro Zone’s suffering inflation rate, which came in at -0.2% for 2014.
“Markets have been waiting 2 1/2 years for ECB President Mario Draghi to put pen to paper on his promise that he’d do whatever it takes, so the larger risk is for Draghi to do something less than spectacular,” Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities, told CNBC.
This morning, the weekly jobless claims reports came in at 307,000 (as opposed to 300,000.) American Express also announced plans to cut about 4,000 jobs over the next year during their 4th quarter earnings report.
Here are the numbers for Thursday on Wall Street:
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 17,813.98 (+259.70)
NASDAQ: 4,750.40 (+82.98)
S&P 500: 2,063.15 (+31.03)