NEW YORK (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st May, 2020) Wall Street's main stock indexes fell about 1 percent on Thursday, but still managed to finish April with double-digit gains despite nearly 30 million Americans losing their jobs due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the broadest equities gauge on the New York Stock Exchange, closed down 1.2 percent at 24,325. The S&P 500, barometer for the top 500 US stocks, fell 1 percent to 2,909. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.3 percent to 8,890.
For the month though, the Dow rose 11 percent, the S&P gained nearly 13 percent and the Nasdaq jumped 15 percent.
Thursday's slide in stocks came after the Labor Department said US job losses from the COVID-19 pandemic have reached nearly 30 million as another 3.8 million Americans filed for jobless claims for the first time last week.
It was a second straight day of bleak data for the US economy after the Commerce Department's first-quarter GDP report on Wednesday, which showed a 4.8 percent decline for the first three months of 2020 - the biggest such slide since the 2008 financial crisis.
While all of Wall Street's three main indexes remained at least 10 percent down on the year, stocks have rebounded in recent weeks on optimism about pending businesses re-openings in most of the 50 US states shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic.
