Wall Street stocks were flat early Friday after US job growth in March disappointed and President Donald Trump ordered air strikes on Syria.
The United States added just 98,000 new jobs last month, much below the 180,000 expected by analysts, the Labor Department reported. In a bright spot, however, unemployment fell to 4.5 percent.
The closely-watched jobs report was overshadowed by Trump’s decision to fire cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack. The move came as the new US president met with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Florida.
Stock futures fell sharply on the news, but then recovered somewhat as the market viewed the US strikes “as an isolated incident without any meaningful economic impact,” Briefing.com analyst Patrick O’Hare said.
“The message of the market was that the attendant risks related to Syria are still within acceptable tolerance levels,” he said.
Around 15 minutes into trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up slightly at 20,665.41.
The broad-based S&P 500 remained essentially flat at 2,357.71, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index declined 0.1 percent to 5,876.23.

Source: Arab News