U.S. stock futures rose on Wednesday morning as Congress proceeded with its so-far deadlocked debt ceiling talks. With no deal in sight, the Democrats and Republicans agreed to revise the negotiation process, which includes smaller negotiation teams.
S&P 500 futures rose 0.2%, while those on the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 0.3% higher. Contracts on the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index remained mostly unchanged.
Grace Peters, JPMorgan Private Bank’s head of investment strategy, explained in an interview that investor anxiety is growing as the U.S. government edges closer to a historic default on its June 1 deadline.
“That is leading to the reason why equity markets have stalled over the last couple of weeks because you are not really paid now to make big bets ahead of this event,” Peters observed.
Should a breakthrough in the talks be achieved, a market rally could be in the pipeline, thereby disrupting what has been a long-unconfident market outlook.
Off the back of the latest debt ceiling developments, the U.S. dollar rose to its highest in five weeks, with the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index rising 0.3%.