NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks rose as Wall Street finished its best week since November. The S&P 500 rose 0.2 percent on Friday, extending its winning streak into a seventh day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.2 percent and the Nasdaq Composite gained 0.2 percent. U.S. Treasury yields edged lower after some mixed reports on the U.S. economy. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note fell to 3.88 percent. The market’s focus next week will shift to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell will deliver a speech at a venue that has been the site of major policy announcements in the past.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street is nearing the end of its best week since November, with U.S. stocks trending higher Friday.

The S&P 500 rose 0.3 percent in afternoon trading and is on track to extend its winning streak into a seventh day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 160 points, or 0.4 percent, with just under an hour to go, and the Nasdaq Composite was 0.3 percent higher.

US Treasury yields fell slightly in the bond market after some mixed reports on the US economy, one of which showed that fewer housing starts were made last month than forecast. That was a small dent in the market after a spate of better-than-expected reports this week on everything from inflation to US retail sales.

But a report later in the morning suggested that U.S. consumers are feeling better about the economy than expected. That’s a big deal for Wall Street because its spending accounts for the bulk of the economy.

Friday’s relative calm capped a hectic week in which strong data helped Wall Street bounce back after a frightening plunge. The S&P 500 is back to within 1.9 percent of its all-time high from last month, after falling nearly 10 percent last week as stocks around the world stumbled on a range of concerns. Many of those questions still hang over the market, just not quite as precariously as before.

One particular concern is the strength of the US economy following last month’s surprisingly weak employment report.

While confidence in the strength of the economy has increased following this week’s reports, it is still likely to flatten under the weight of high interest rates. And that’s intentional. The Federal Reserve’s goal was to cool the overheated labor market by making credit and spending more expensive for businesses and households. The Fed did this to ease upward pressure on inflation, which peaked at over 9% two summers ago.

The question is whether the slowdown in economic growth will overshoot the mark and widen into a recession. That is too early to tell, but Wall Street is hoping that an expected rate cut at the Fed’s next meeting in September will help prevent that from happening.

Market focus next week will be on Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell will speak later in the week and where the location has been the scene of major policy announcements in the past.

Since the Fed has stated that its future steps will depend largely on the data released at that time, “it will be difficult for Powell to commit to a specific direction in advance in Jackson Hole,” say economists at Deutsche Bank led by Matthew Luzzetti.

However, Powell could provide clues as to whether the Fed’s interest rate cuts are merely intended to take the brakes off the economy or to give it a boost.

A second major market concern is whether investors, in their hype about artificial intelligence, have driven up the prices of Nvidia and other influential stocks of the big technology companies too high.

This debate is not over yet. In just one hour on Friday morning, Nvidia went from being the heaviest weight in the S&P 500 to being the strongest driver of the index. The stock tipped from an initial decline of 1.4 percent to a later rise of 1.3 percent.

Such fluctuations are typical for the stock that has become the face of the AI ​​hype. After a price increase of over 170 percent in the first six and a half months of the year, Nvidia plummeted by more than 20 percent in the following three weeks.

A third factor that has caused the big swings in global markets is technical. It was triggered by a rate hike by the Bank of Japan, which forced hedge funds around the world to abandon a popular trade en masse, borrowing Japanese yen at cheap rates to invest elsewhere.

The forced and sudden selling that followed hit markets around the world, but calmed down after a senior Bank of Japan official said it would not raise interest rates further while markets were unstable. However, analysts believe there could be further potential selling in the system.

On Wall Street, H&R Block posted one of the market’s biggest gains after reporting better-than-expected profit for its latest quarter, increasing its dividend by 17 percent and announcing a share buyback program worth up to $1.5 billion.

In the bond market, the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes fell to 3.89 percent from 3.92 percent late Thursday. The yield on two-year Treasury notes, which is more in line with expectations for Fed action, fell to 4.06 percent from 4.10 percent late Thursday.

On overseas exchanges, Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 3.6 percent, recording its best week in more than four years. It was a strong rebound from heavy losses the previous week, in which the Japanese market experienced its worst day since the Black Monday crash of 1987.

Stan Choe, The Associated Press