Stocks push higher despite bad jobs news

NEW YORK - Stocks staged a late afternoon rally after being weighed down most of the day by an unexpected rise in the unemployment rate. Indexes closed higher for the third straight day.

Materials and energy companies led the rebound. Newmont Mining Corp. gained 3.1 percent and the oil-field services company Schlumberger Ltd. added 2.5 percent. The dollar fell 1.4 percent against an index of six other currencies. Oil and gold prices rose.

Michael Sheldon, chief market strategist at RDM Financial Group in Westport, Conn., said the relationship between a weaker dollar and stronger stocks followed a recent trend.

"You don't see it every day," he said, "but it's a clear inverse relationship: When the dollar goes down, stocks go up."

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 19.68, or 0.2 percent, to close at 11,382.09.

The Standard & Poor's 500 rose 3.18, or 0.3 percent, to 1,224.71. The Nasdaq composite index rose 12.11, or 0.5 percent, to 2,591.46.

Stocks spent most of the day in a slump. The Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate climbed to a seven-month high of 9.8 percent in November. Employers added just 39,000 jobs, far below what economists had forecast.

Expectations of job growth had risen Wednesday after a report showed that private companies were hiring at the fastest pace in three years. That and strong reports Thursday on retail spending and home sales pushed the Dow Jones industrial average up 356 points in two days.

Of the 30 stocks that make up the Dow, 17 rose. Bank of America Corp. led the index with a 1.5 percent gain. Cisco Systems Inc. was the laggard, falling 0.8 percent.

The weak jobs report was a reminder that the recovery is proceeding fitfully. The recession that started in December 2007 ended more than a year ago, in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. But the fallout lingers in the form of a rising unemployment rate. Economists say the economy will have to add up to 300,000 jobs a month before the unemployment rate drops significantly.

In corporate news, the discount retailer Big Lots Inc. fell 5.1 percent after reporting that its third-quarter income dropped 42 percent.

Rising shares outpaced falling ones by almost 2-1 on the New York Stock Exchange.