* Nasdaq hovers at 10-year high; world stocks up in April
* Silver sizzles in April; gold at all-time high
* U.S. dollar index <.DXY> at 3-year low
* Oil near 31-year peak on weak dollar, geopolitical risks
(Recast lead, update prices, changes byline)
By Richard Leong
NEW YORK, April 29 (Reuters) - Global markets closed out a
week to remember on Friday after the Nasdaq touched a 10-year
high while gold and silver broke record levels in the wake of
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's pledge to keep pumping
cheap money into the economy.
Silver rose 4 percent on the week after posting a series of
record highs near $50 an ounce. On the month, it has jumped 29
percent, making it the best investment in April.
Major stock indexes including the Nasdaq lagged precious
metals but racked up solid weekly and monthly gains, despite
worries over the unrest in the Middle East, unsolved public
debt problems on both sides of the Atlantic and cost of the
natural disasters that ravaged Japan in March.
"There is a big bias towards the market going up and we've
seen this through good news and what we would consider bad
news," said Kim Caughey Forrest, senior equity research analyst
at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh.
"The market kind of shrugs it all off and keeps marching
higher."
The billions of dollars the U.S. central bank has created
to help the economy have succeeded in inflating asset prices
and stemming deflation, but has failed to generate robust
growth and to slash unemployment.
Bernanke's promise of keeping U.S. interest rates near zero
crushed the dollar <.DXY> which sagged to three-year lows
against major currencies this week, as traders piled into
"carry trades" using the cheap greenback to fund them.
The Dow Jones industrial average <> was up 58.54
points, or 0.46 percent, at 12,821.85. The Standard & Poor's
500 Index <.SPX> was up 2.94 points, or 0.22 percent, at
1,363.42. The Nasdaq Composite Index <> was up 1.29
points, or 0.04 percent, at 2,873.82
European shares gained 0.3 percent, rising for a seventh
straight session, although volumes were crimped by a holiday in
Britain for the royal wedding.
World equities as measured by the MSCI <.MIWD00000PUS>
index was up 3.9 percent in April, despite anxiety over oil
prices slowing global growth.
Benchmark crude oil prices <LCOc1> were above $125 a barrel
in London, near 31-month highs, as the tumbling dollar and
violence in North Africa and the Middle East outweighed
concerns about slowing U.S. economic growth. []
METALS BURN BRIGHT
Silver <XAG=> roared ahead and gold <XAU=> was set for its
seventh consecutive weekly rise, its longest winning streak
since 2007. It was last up at $1,557.77 an ounce on course for
an 8 percent monthly gain, its biggest since November. []
Boosted by the rally in precious metals, the 19-commodity
Reuters-Jefferies CRB index <.CRB>, a broad indicator of the
commodity market, is up 10 percent for the year, making it the
world's best-performing asset group. In mid-afternoon trading,
the CRB was up 1.1 percent at 370.24, a 52-week intraday high.
April's strength in equity and commodity markets came
almost entirely at the dollar's expense after Standard & Poor's
revised downward its outlook for the United States' stellar
triple-A sovereign credit rating.
The dollar's slide was exacerbated by the Federal Reserve's
statement on Wednesday that it intends to keep interest rates
at historic lows to help bolster the tepid U.S. economic
recovery.
Friday's economic reports reinforced this fragile outlook.
Data showed slowing growth in regional manufacturing and high
gasoline prices reducing Americans' purchasing power.
[]
"It's still a story of general dollar weakness," said
Richard Wiltshire, chief FX broker at ETX Capital. "Markets are
pretty thin and there's not a lot of depth to them." []
The U.S. dollar index versus major currencies <.DXY> fell
as low as 72.834, the lowest since 2008. It fell five straight
months, declining
The euro <EUR=> touched a 17-month high against the
greenback, trading at $1.4844 by 1500 GMT.
Inflation in the 17-nation euro-zone bloc edged up 2.8
percent in April compared with a year ago -- well above the 2.0
percent target ceiling of the European Central Bank. Earlier
this month, the ECB raised interest rates for the first time in
two years. The latest inflation numbers raised prospects for
another ECB interest-rate increase soon. []
On the other side of the Atlantic, tame inflation in the
U.S. supported values of longer-dated U.S. government bonds.
The benchmark U.S. Treasury 10-year note <US10YT=RR> was up
4/32 in price in light volume, yielding 3.29 percent, its
lowest level in more than a month. The bond market consolidated
gains made this week on softer economic data and prospects for
accommodative monetary policy in the months ahead. []
* For Reuters Global Investing Blog, click on
http://blogs.reuters.com/globalinvesting
* For the MacroScope Blog, click on
http://blogs.reuters.com/macroscope
* For Hedge Fund Blog, click on
http://blogs.reuters.com/hedgehub
(Additional reporting by Barani Krishnan, Chuck Mikolajczak,
Frank Tang, Robert Gibbons and Julie Haviv and Ellen Freilich,
Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
