Going up: Banks and other financial companies led U.S. stocks sharply higher in afternoon trading today, pushing the Dow Jones industrial average above 21,000 points for the first time. The Associated Press reports that the rally comes a day after President Donald Trump addressed Congress, reaffirming plans to cut taxes and push for other business-friendly policies. Energy and materials companies were also among the big gainers, while utilities stocks lagged. “It’s nice to see the Dow put another thousand figure up so quickly,” says Paul Christopher, head global market strategist for Wells Fargo Investment Institute. “At the same time, it sort of suggests this is a sentiment-driven rally. There’s usually some recalibration of sentiment at some point.” Read the full story.
Unauthorized accounts: More Wells Fargo customers may have been impacted by a sales scandal than previously believed, the U.S. lender says in a regulatory filing today. Reuters reports the company had previously estimated that up to 2 million customers may have had accounts opened in their names without authorization. As part of an expanded review of affected customers, Wells Fargo says in its annual 10-K filing that there could be “an increase in the identified number of potentially impacted customers.” The company has agreed to pay $185 million in penalties and $5 million to customers that regulators say were pushed into fee-generating accounts that they never requested. Read the full story.
Signs of life: Scientists examining the chemical makeup of some of the Earth’s oldest rocks, located in northwestern Canada, may have found the oldest-known chemical fossils of bacteria. Bloomberg reports the team believes they are the remains of microbes that thrived near volcanic vents on the seafloor from 3.8 to 4.3 billion years ago. Matthew Dodd, a Ph.D. student at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, and seven colleagues say chemical patterns they found look just like known deposits of vent-loving microbes in much more recent samples from other locations. And the compounds they identified through laser imaging are consistent with the waste and remains of iron-eating bacteria that live near hydrothermal vents today.The geological breakthrough was announced today in the scientific journal Nature. Read the full story.
