NEW YORK — U.S. stock indexes are rising Wednesday as Wall Street waits to hear what the Federal Reserve will say in the afternoon about where interest rates may be heading.
The S&P 500 was up 0.8% in afternoon trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 262 points, or 0.6%, as of 12:33 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 1% higher.
The relatively quiet trading is a respite following weeks of sharp and scary swings for the U.S. stock market. Uncertainty is high about how much pain President Donald Trump will allow the economy to endure in order to remake the system as he wants. He’s said he wants manufacturing jobs back in the United States and far fewer people working for the federal government.
Trump’s barrage of announcements on tariffs and other policies have created so much uncertainty that economists worry U.S. businesses and households may freeze and pull back on their spending.
If the economy gets too weak, the Fed could lower interest rates in order to give it a boost, as it has in so many prior downturns. It has plenty of room to cut, with its main interest rate sitting at a range between 4.25% and 4.50%.
But conditions may be more complicated for the Fed this time around. Besides goosing the economy, lowering rates would also push inflation upward, and worries are already high about inflation because of tariffs. The Fed does not have a good tool to fix what’s called “ stagflation,” where the economy is stagnating but inflation remains high.
Virtually all of Wall Street is expecting the Fed to announce no change to its main interest rate this afternoon, as it waits to see how conditions play out. For the moment, the job market seems to be relatively solid overall after the economy closed last year running at a solid pace.
What will be more important for investors is the set of forecasts the central bank will release after the meeting is over. That will show where Fed officials see interest rates, the economy and inflation heading in upcoming years.
The expectation among traders is that the Fed will cut rates at least two or three times by the end of 2025.
On Wall Street, Nvidia helped support the market after rising 1.9% to cut its loss for the year so far to 12.4%. It hosted an event Tuesday where it largely “did a nice job laying out the roadmap” and fighting back against speculation the artificial-intelligence industry is seeing a slowdown in demand for computing power, according to UBS analysts led by Timothy Arcuri.
Tesla also rose 4.4%, following two straight losses of roughly 5%. It’s still down 41.7% for 2025 so far. It’s been struggling on worries that customers are turned off by CEO Elon Musk’s leading efforts to slash spending by the U.S. government.
Big Tech has generally been at the center of the market’s recent sell-off, as stocks whose momentum had earlier seemed unstoppable have since dropped sharply following criticism they had simply grown too expensive.
On the losing side of Wall Street Wednesday was General Mills, which fell 2.3% despite reporting a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.
The cereal and snack maker’s revenue fell short of analysts’ targets, in part because of a slowdown in sales for snacks. General Mills also cut forecasts for revenue and profit over its full fiscal year, partly because it expects “macroeconomic uncertainty” to continue to affect its customers.
In stock markets abroad, Japan’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.2% after the Bank of Japan held steady on its own interest rates, as was widely expected. Japan also reported a trade surplus for February, with exports rising more than 11% as manufacturers rushed to beat rising tariffs imposed by Trump.
Other indexes were mixed across Europe and Asia.
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury edged down to 4.30% from 4.31% late Tuesday.
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AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.