New York (AFP)

The New York Stock Exchange ended sharply higher on Friday despite a devastating report on American employment in April, investors betting that the worst of the crisis has passed.

Its flagship index, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, gained 1.91% to 24,331.32 points and the Nasdaq, with strong technological coloring, appreciated by 1.58% to 9,121.32 points.

The broader S&P 500 Index, which represents the 500 largest companies on Wall Street, gained 1.69% to 2,929.80 points.

Over the week, the Dow Jones rose 2.6%, the Nasdaq 6% and the S&P 500 3.5%.

Today's highly anticipated figures, however, reflected a grim situation, the pandemic having destroyed 20.5 million jobs in April in the United States, a record level in such a short time.

This is "more than twice the number of job losses taken during the financial crisis" of 2007-2009, note analysts at Oxford Economics. "There have been more jobs lost in the past two months than have been created in the past decade," they add.

The unemployment rate, which stood at 3.5% in February, jumped to 14.7% in April, its highest level since June 1940.

But investors, who are still trying to anticipate future corporate earnings, "expect the statistics to recover from the third quarter and really improve in the fourth quarter," said Art Hogan of National Holdings.

They are encouraged in this sense by several signals, such as Uber which claimed that its activity had started up again in the last three weeks or Ford which said that its production would resume on May 18 in the United States.

Several American states have also started to gradually reopen their economies and "market players do not anticipate a second wave of contagion which could lead to restrictive measures as strict as those which have just been imposed", considers Mr. Hogan .

To this optimism about the situation to come is added the fact that "there is currently a lot of money in circulation" with all the liquidity injected by the American Central Bank for two months to ensure that the markets function well, points out the specialist. Enough to fuel the rise in indices.

The latter were also supported on Friday by statements saying that Chinese and American negotiators had pledged to implement their trade agreement signed earlier this year despite the coronavirus epidemic.

A positive signal as tensions between the two leading world economic powers seemed to have rekindled in recent days.

On the bond market, the 10-year rate on the American debt rose, settling around 20:15 GMT at 0.6783% against 0.6409% Thursday evening.

© 2020 AFP