Stocks closed higher, Friday, with banks taking the lead but investors remained focus on the results of the long-awaited meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s chief-executive, Xi Jinping in the Group of 20 Nations summit earlier tonight.
J.P. Morgan Chase JPM, +2.72% Morgan Stanley MS, +0.74% Citigroup C, +2.76% and Wells Fargo WFC, +2.23% all rose after the Federal Reserve’s second round of stress test results late Thursday.
But things could change following the meeting between the leaders of the two economic powers tonight. “There’s a lot of uncertainty as to what the meeting, due to place on Saturday (02.30 GMT), will produce, but the minimum outcome that traders are anticipating is for the two sides to restart the stalled trade negotiations and delay imposing any additional tariffs,” wrote Raffi Boyadjian, senior investment analyst at brokerage XM, in a daily research note.
Trump has been pressured by multi-sectoral movements to lift the tariffs imposed on Chinese products and the sanctions it imposed on Huawei and other Chinese companies. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce has also made a similar call.
President Trump, meanwhile thinks that the closely-watched meeting between him and Xi Jinping would be “productive.”
“At a minimum, it will be productive,” Trump said of the meeting with Xi.
“We’ll see what happens and what comes out of it,” Trump told reporters. Asked, however, if he had promised Xi a six-month reprieve on imposing new tariffs on a $300bn list of Chinese imports, Trump said: “No.”
