STOCKS RALLY: Here's What You Need To Know

The S&P is getting close to an all-time high again.

First the scoreboard:

Dow: 14,700, +24.5 pts, +0.1%
S&P 500: 1,585, +6.3 pts, +0.4%
NASDAQ: 3,289, +20.3 pts, +0.6%

And now the top stories:

• Stocks have quietly rallied in recent weeks, and now the S&P 500 is within points of its new all-time closing high of 1,593.
• "Some traders ... think that the new rally really kicked in when news that a graduate student had found flaws in the Reinhart/Rogoff paper on the limiting power of public debt on the economy – thus casting doubt on that thesis," said UBS's Art Cashin. Cashin is talking about UMass grad student Thomas Herndon, who has basically turned the global austerity movement into a joke.
• Initial jobless claims fell to 339,000 from 455,000 last week. This was lower than the 350,000 level economists were looking for. This was great news from the persistently week U.S. labor market.
• The Kansas City Fed manufacturing index report told a different story. The headline number was unchanged at -5. Economists were looking for an improvement to -1. "Our expectations for future increases have cooled considerably in the last few months," said one of the survey's respondents.
• A weird headline at around 3 p.m. EDT introduced some volatility to the markets. Bloomberg sent a report from German newspaper Handelsblatt across the wire saying that the German Bundesbank rejected the ECB's "OMT" bond buying program in a secret opinion prepared the German constitutional court (which is set to rule on OMT in June). Stocks and the euro both dipped briefly, but both recovered.
• Amazon.com announces earnings after the closing bell today. Follow the release live at BusinessInsider.com.
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