Stock market today: Calm returns to Wall Street, and tech stocks lead US indexes higher 

​

NEW YORK (AP) — Calm is returning to Wall Street Tuesday, and tech stocks are leading U.S. stock indexes higher following a strong profit report from Palantir Technologies, a darling benefitting from the artificial-intelligence boom.The S&P 500 was up 0.5% as of 2:01 p.m. Eastern time, a day after swinging sharply on worries that President Donald Trump’s tariffs could spark a trade war that would hurt economies around the world, including the United States.The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 46 points, or 0.1%, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.1% higher.
Trump on Monday agreed to delay his taxes on U.S. imports of Canadian and Mexican products for a month, with the announcement on Canada coming after trading closed for the day. That bolstered Wall Street’s longstanding hopes that Trump’s tough talk on tariffs may be just that, talk. The hope is that Trump sees tariffs as a stick he can use in negotiations with trading partners rather than as a long-term policy.That hope is built in part on traders’ belief that Trump would likely be turned off by the damage Wall Street would take if a worst-case, long-term trade war were to occur. Trump has pointed in the past to the stock market as a real-time measure of his approval.But a trade war is still possible, and some analysts say more swings may be coming because Trump’s threats should be taken both seriously and literally.“Investors have suggested the equity market is the US administration’s scorecard and any policy changes that hurt risk assets will be quickly dialed back,” Bank of America strategists led by Mark Cabana wrote in a BofA Global Research report. “We advise caution.”They say a big takeaway from all the tariff tumult is that the Trump administration is transactional, and “nothing is settled until it is final.”Trump is pressing ahead with a 10% tax on U.S. companies importing things from China, for example. And China retaliated on Tuesday by announcing its own tariffs on some U.S. imports and an antitrust investigation into Google.But the 15% tariff on U.S. coal and liquefied natural gas products, as well as a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery and large-engine cars imported from the U.S. won’t take effect until Monday. That leaves time for more negotiation between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.Some on Wall Street also see tariffs on China as separate from Trump’s moves against other trading partners. Trump may be more likely to keep tariffs on China for the longer term, as he did in his first term, because of a desire to separate the United States more from its geopolitical rival.Outside of China, the result of all this tumult for Canada, Mexico, the European Union and other U.S. allies is more likely to be concessions and not tariffs, according to Thierry Wizman, a strategist at Macquarie.
The stock price of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, rose 1.8%. The company w