MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Dow Jones industrials hit record

Wall Street's blue-chip Dow Jones index closed at a record high last night as investors cheered tumbling world oil prices, which should boost corporate profits and ease fears of US inflation.

The index of 30 blue chip stocks moved into uncharted territory, rising as high as 11,754.55 shortly after 12:30pm; it surpassed the milestone after briefly passing its record high close of 11.722.98 on Thursday and Monday. Both records were set on Jan. 14, 2000, before the stock market began a precipitous decline caused by the dot-com bust and recession and worsened by the aftermath of terrorism and corporate scandals.

While investors welcomed the Dow's latest achievement, it came in a stock market that is more conservative, even more muted, than the Wall Street of early 2000. At that time, investors were still piling exuberantly into high-tech stocks. In 2006, the market's gains come only after investors' careful parsing of economic data and corporate earnings reports.

The Dow, whose well-known large-cap stocks include aluminum producer Alcoa Inc., discount retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and the Walt Disney Co., has recovered ahead of the broader Standard & Poor's 500 and the Nasdaq composite index, which also peaked in early 2000. Those indexes were inflated ? overinflated in the case of the Nasdaq ? by the dot-com bubble.

The S&P 500's high close was 1,527.46, a milestone that conceivably can be surpassed in the near future if the market stays on an upward course. But no one expects to see the Nasdaq eclipse its high of 5,048.62 any time soon.

To reach new highs, the Dow had to recover not only from the high-tech collapse, but also recession and the effects of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The stock market was further shaken by corporate scandals at companies including Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc., and the Dow sank to a five-year closing low of 7,286.27 on Oct. 9, 2002, nearly 38 percent off its record high close.

The market's recovery was helped by more than four years of solid corporate profit growth, and more recently, the Federal Reserve's decision to halt its more than two-year string of interest rate hikes.