'Cliff' Deal Sends Stocks Up, But Problems Lurk

By CHRISTINA REXRODE

NEW YORK (AP) ⿿ The "fiscal cliff" compromise, even with all its chaos, controversy and unresolved questions, was enough to ignite the stock market on Wednesday, the first trading day of the new year.

The Dow Jones industrial average careened more than 300 points higher, its biggest gain since December 2011. It's now just 5 percent below its record high close reached in October 2007. The Russell 2000, an index that tracks smaller companies, shot up to 873.42, the highest close in its history.

The reverie multiplied across the globe, with stock indexes throughout Europe and Asia leaping higher. A leading British index, the FTSE 100, closed above 6,000 for the first time since July 2011, at 6,027.37.

In the U.S., the rally was extraordinarily broad. For every stock that fell on the New York Stock Exchange, roughly 10 rose. All 30 stocks that make up the Dow rose, as did 94 percent of the stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500 index.

U.S. government bond prices dipped sharply as investors pulled money out of safe-harbor investments. And the VIX, the "fear index" that measures investors' expectations of future market volatility, plunged more than 18 percent to 14.68, the lowest close since October.

The very last week of each year and the first two days of the new year usually average out to a gain for U.S. stocks. But the size of this year's gains made it stand out.

The Dow has risen on the first day of the trading year for each of the past four years, from 2009 to 2012. The average gain was 171 points ⿿ sizable, but still much smaller than Wednesday's leap of 308.41.

In the midst of the euphoria, many investors remained cautious. The deal that politicians hammered out merely postpones the country's budget reckoning, they said, rather than averting it.

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