Wall Street rallies as oil prices fall, dollar gains

NEW YORK — Wall Street rallied today as oil prices, supported by a stronger dollar, fell back and alleviated some of investors' concerns about accelerating inflation.

The Dow Jones industrials climbed 130.43 points to 12,876.31.

Microsoft, one of the 30 Dow stocks, added 60 cents to close at $29.99. Boeing, another Dow stock, was up 74 cents to end the day at $84.80.

The Nasdaq composite index rose 42.97 points to 2,488.49. The Standard & Poor's 500 index advanced 15.30 points to 1,403.58.

The dollar's advance, a break from the greenback's long losing streak, also helped soothe some of Wall Street's worries about inflation's impact on consumer spending.

The greenback's gain helped send light, sweet crude oil down $1.73 to settle at $124.23 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil briefly reached a new trading high of $126.40, but investors seemed shy, for the time being at least, to add to oil's huge gain of nearly $10 last week.

The market also got some encouraging news about the credit crisis from London-based HSBC Holdings, which said its first-quarter profit was up from a year ago although the global banking company took a $3.2 billion write-down on subprime mortgage assets in the United States. The company did echo other assessments that the U.S. was likely to fall into a recession this year.

Today's advance follows a week in which the major indexes all fell as worries about the impact of inflation weighed on investors.

"This market does seem to be reacting positively to any sort of easing we see in the energy patch," said Craig Peckham, market strategist at Jefferies & Co.

He also contends that some of the buying is because of last week's decline in which the Dow industrials lost 2.4 percent and the S&P 500 declined 1.81 percent.

"This market, after having had a pretty rough last week, is prone to drawing in some more value-seekers," he said.