Stocks Fluctuated after ECB Stimulus Measures

U.S. stocks opened higher and turned negative in the early trading on Thursday after the European Central Bank announced its long-anticipated plant to breathe new live into the slumping eurozone economy through the purchases of debt. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lately fell 25.31 points, or 0.14%, to 17,528.97. The S&P 500 was down 0.26 point, or 0.01%, to 2,031.86. The Nasdaq Composite lost 8.16 points, or 0.17%, to 4,659.26.

The European Central Bank took the ultimate policy leap on Thursday, launching a government bond-buying programme which will pump hundreds of billions of new money into a sagging euro zone economy. Together with existing schemes to buy private debt and funnel hundreds of billions of euros in cheap loans to banks, the new quantitative easing programme will pump 60 billion euros a month into the economy, ECB President Mario Draghi said.

The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits fell last week but remained near a seven-month high, raising a concern that momentum in the jobs market could be easing early in the year. Initial jobless claims decreased by 10,000 to a seasonally adjusted 307,000 in the week ended Jan. 17, the Labor Department said Thursday.

Verizon Communications Inc’s quarterly revenue rose 6.8 percent due to an increase in subscribers who pay for services after use, and a rise in average revenue per account as users added more devices to shared data plans. The company, however, reported a loss of $2.15 billion, or 54 cents per share, for the fourth quarter compared with a profit of $7.92 billion, or $1.76 per share, a year earlier, mainly due to valuation of benefits plan and pension adjustments.

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