By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. stocks opened markedly higher on Tuesday, with hopes for a quick restart to the U.S. economy defying another barrage of bad news and gloomy forecasts on the Covid-19 front.
By 9:40 AM ET (1340 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 511 points or 2.2% at 23,902 points, its highest in over a month. The S&P 500 was also up 2.2% and the Nasdaq Composite was up 2.4%.
The move came on the back of another bullish briefing by President Donald Trump on Monday, who amped up the pressure on state governors to ensure that state-wide lockdowns don't drag on through the summer.
However, the news from the economy itself continued to be bad. The International Monetary Fund predicted the worst global recession since the 1930s, including a 5.9% drop in gross domestic product for the U.S.
Two of the country's biggest banks, meanwhile, reported big jumps in provisions against bad loans as they kicked off the first-quarter earnings season, JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) booking $6.8 billion in provisions and Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) booking $4 billion. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned that provisions could rise further in the coming quarters.
JPMorgan stock rose 2.8% while Wells Fargo stock rose 1.6%.
Among the other big winners was Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), whose stock rose 2.2% to a new all-time high on hopes that it had removed a bottleneck that had stopped it maximizing sales in the early days of the U.S. lockdowns. The company said it will relax restrictions on shipping non-essential goods on Monday.