Stocks Retreat on Jobs News
Although the reasons behind Thursday's surge were a bit of a mystery, there were plenty of reasons for stocks to retreat yesterday -- reports of rising unemployment, more profit warnings and the bankruptcy filing of California's biggest utility.</br></br>The Dow Jones industrial average fell 126.96 points to close at 9791.09, after soaring the previous day to its second-largest daily point gain. The Nasdaq composite index slipped 64.64, to 1720.36. The stock market's broadest measure, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, fell 23.01, to 1128.43.</br></br>For the week, the Nasdaq dropped 6.6 percent, the S&P 500 declined 2.9 percent and the Dow fell 1.1 percent, despite the frenzied buying on Thursday.</br></br>Thursday's "rally was severe," said Michael W. Clark, head of equity trading for Credit Suisse First Boston, who said the sell-off yesterday was a logical reaction to that. "The bottom line," he said, "is that the underlying trend hasn't changed."</br></br>Yesterday morning, the Labor Department reported that the nation's unemployment rate rose to 4.3 percent in March, the highest it has been in 20 months. Worse, businesses cut 86,000 jobs, the biggest one- month reduction in payrolls since 1991.