US close: Stocks carve out small gains to start the week in the green
US stocks closed flat to slightly higher on Monday as investors digested yet another slew of corporate earnings and fresh news around ongoing trade talks with China.
At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.04% at 26,554.39, while the S&P 500 closed 0.11% firmer at 2,943.03 and the Nasdaq ended the ended session 0.19% higher at 8,161,85.
The Dow closed 11 points higher on Monday after the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite closed at record highs on Friday following better-than-expected results from a handful of US firms.
In trade news, US Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, said talks between the US and China were "getting into the final laps" ahead of another round of talks between the two nations which was due to start the next day.
"I think both sides have a desire to reach an agreement," Mnuchin said, according to the New York Times. "We’ve made a lot of progress."
However, Mnuchin said that while both countries were nearing a deal, the negotiations were also reaching a point where either an agreement could happen or the whole saga could still end without a deal.
Both Mnuchin and Lighthizer were set to head to Beijing for talks on Tuesday.
Elsewhere, a slowdown in global growth and heightened tensions in trade and geopolitics have begun to pose economic challenges for countries throughout the Middle East, according to the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF's Regional Economic Outlook report highlighted how volatile oil prices had negatively affected some countries.
"For oil-importing countries where debt is high, it’s very important to tackle it and to reduce the level of deficit. That will allow those countries to reduce their debt burden over GDP," said the IMF's Middle East and Central Asian director Jihad Azour.
As of 2200 BST, West Texas Intermediate was trading 0.52% higher at $63.63 per barrel, while a barrel of Brent Crude was 0.12% weaker at $72.06.
In corporate news, Spotify closed 0.080% on Monday as fears that rivals Google and Amazon were coming to take its crown dampened news that it had hit 100m paid subscribers.
Burger King owner Restaurant Brands slid 1.51% in the session after turning in a whopper first-quarter earnings miss as a result of slowing sales.
Shares in Google parent company Alphabet dropped 7.34% in after-hours trading as the group failed to cash in on the improving economy that boosted rivals throughout the first quarter, leaving revenues below Wall Street targets.
Western Digital dipped 0.99% as its first-quarter figures posted after the close revealed that it had fallen short of expectations on earnings as a result of a $110m inventory write-down.
On the data front, Americans splashed out last month, with consumption accelerating by a factor of almost ten in comparison to the previous month, but income growth fell well short of economists' forecasts.
According to the Department of Commerce, in month-on-month terms, personal income and spending rose by 0.1% and 0.9%, respectively.
When discussing the PCE report's impact on Jerome Powell and the Fed's next steps, Pantheon Macroeconomics' Ian Shepherdson said: "The bottom line is that three straight months with very small core PCE readings, leaving the y/y rate at 1.6%, will not go unnoticed at the Fed.
"We think it’s mostly noise rather than signal, but the y/y rate is unlikely to rise much before late summer and could easily dip further in the meantime. If the Fed hikes this year, it will be because of accelerating wages, not the inflation rate at the time."
Elsewhere, the manufacturing sector lost momentum in April with the general business activity index dropping to 2 from 6.9 in March, according to the Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
The reading came was well below market expectation for a reading of 10.