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Alphabet and Microsoft help Wall St. clinch its best week in nearly 6 months

NEW YORK — The best week for U.S. stocks since November closed out with more gains thanks to Alphabet and Microsoft on Friday.

The S&P 500 rallied 1% to finish its first winning week in the last four. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 153 points, or 0.4%, and the Nasdaq composite jumped 2%.

Alphabet leaped 10.2% after breezing past analysts’ expectations for profit last quarter. The parent company of Google also said it will start paying a dividend to investors and authorized a program to buy back up to $70 billion of its stock, a signal of how much cash it’s generating.

Microsoft, meanwhile, climbed 1.8% after reporting stronger profit and revenue than expected. It cited strong growth in its cloud-computing business as it pushes artificial-intelligence technology to its customers.

They helped offset a 9.2% drop for Intel. It reported stronger profit for the latest quarter than expected, but its revenue fell short of analysts’ estimates. So did its forecast for profit in the current quarter.

Stocks have broadly been under pressure this month after hopes withered for multiple cuts to interest rates this year by the Federal Reserve. A series of reports this year showing inflation remaining worse than forecast has traders expecting maybe one cut this year, down from forecasts for six or more at the start of the year.

Yet another report on Friday showed inflation remaining stubbornly high. This time it was the measure of prices for March that the Federal Reserve prefers to use, but it wasn’t much worse than forecasts. Financial markets took it much more in stride than a report from the day before that suggested the same measure of inflation rose quickly from January through March.

Treasury yields largely eased in the bond market following Friday morning’s report. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.66% from 4.71% late Thursday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for the Fed, held steadier. It edged down to 4.99% from 5.00%.

While inflation has remained hotter than forecast, EY Chief Economist Gregory Daco expects it to cool in coming months as shoppers pressured in part by slowing growth in wages tamp down their purchases, which is the fuel that gives inflation energy.

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