Wall Street hits more records as Tesla zooms

NEW YORK — Tesla zoomed higher and helped drive the U.S. stock market to more records on Tuesday.

The S&P 500 added 0.6% to top its all-time high set two weeks ago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 162 points, or 0.4%, and the Nasdaq composite added 0.8% to its own record set a day before.

Tesla led the way with a 10.2% jump after the electric-vehicle maker reported a milder drop in sales for the spring than analysts expected. Modest gains for other big, influential stocks also helped lift the market, including a 1.6% climb for Apple.

Stocks got a lift from easing Treasury yields after the head of the Federal Reserve made comments that investors took as a signal for possible cuts to interest rates later this year. Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose utterances are always finely parsed for hints about rates, gave a nod to improvements in inflation data after some disappointingly high readings early in the year.

“We just want to understand that the levels that we’re seeing are a true reading of underlying inflation,” he said.

The hope on Wall Street is that inflation will slow enough to convince the Fed to lower its main interest rate, which has been sitting at its highest level in more than two decades and pressing the brakes on the economy. Treasury yields have largely been easing since April on hopes for such cuts.

A report on Tuesday may have hindered those hopes, though. It showed U.S. employers were advertising more job openings at the end of May than economists expected and slightly more than April’s tally.