ETFs pegged to the major U.S. equity benchmarks were on track for slight weekly gains in Friday afternoon trading with a month left until the deadline on a budget deal in Washington.
The S&P 500 was up 0.3%, the Dow was flat for the week and the Nasdaq Composite added 1.3%.
“If you look at the net-net of all the noise surrounding the fiscal cliff, there’s very little impact in terms of meaningful actions,” said Douglas Cote at ING U.S. Investment Management in a Bloomberg News report. “For the market, it’s creating intraday volatility.”
On Wall Street, the conventional wisdom is that Congress and the Obama administration will take the negotiations down to the wire before reaching a compromise.
“There is no sign of it from the rhetoric but there are expectations it will happen,” said Steve Goldman, principal at Goldman Management, in a Reuters article. “The rhetoric will get worse before it gets better.”
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