More than 37,000 points: the Dow Jones index has never been so high. Other Signa companies are in danger of going bankrupt

The prospect of falling interest rates pushed the Dow Jones Industrial to a record high on Wednesday. The best-known Wall Street index exceeded the 37,000 point mark for the first time and ended the day with an increase of 1.40 percent to 37,090.24 points.

Since the rally after the interim low at the end of October, the Dow Jones is now up just over 14 percent. There has been an increase of almost 12 percent since the beginning of the year.

The market-wide S&P 500 rose 1.37 percent to 4,707.09 points on Wednesday. The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 rose 1.27 percent to 16,562.37 points. These two indices have also risen sharply over the course of the current stock market rally and are now just below their highs.

As expected, the US Federal Reserve left key interest rates unchanged within a range of 5.25 to 5.50 percent. However, for 2024, monetary authorities in Washington expect increasingly larger interest rate cuts than before.

They now assume an average policy interest rate of 4.6 percent. In September they assumed an average of 5.1 percent. This now indicates around three rate cuts in 2024 with a total volume of 0.75 percentage points. (sda/dpa)