Wall Street futures rise, shrug off allied missile attack on Syria

Ten years after the start of the financial crisis that erased US$16.4 trillion in assets from U.S. households, Americans have yet to embrace the U.S. stock market with the same fervor as before, holding fewer individual stocks and putting less money into equities overall despite an uninterrupted 9-year bull market that has pushed the S&P 500 up nearly 310 percent from its 2009 lows.

NEW YORK: U.S. equity index futures rose on Sunday as financial market trading resumed for the first time since the United States, Britain and France hit Syria with missile strikes in retaliation for a suspected poison gas attack.

The move suggested Wall Street was set to shrug off the attack and Russian President Vladimir Putin's warning on Sunday that further Western attacks on Syria would bring chaos to world affairs.

In the first few minutes of trading on Sunday evening, S&P 500 e-mini futures were up by about 0.6 percent. Futures tracking the Nasdaq Composite Index and Dow Jones Industrial Average were up by comparable amounts.

Futures tracking safe-haven U.S. Treasury securities were slightly lower.

U.S. stocks fell on Friday as results from big banks failed to enthuse and worries over the Syria situation, but major market benchmarks gained ground on the week.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday said he had convinced U.S. President Donald Trump to keep troops in Syria for the long term and limit joint strikes to chemical weapons facilities.

Early on Saturday, the United States, France and Britain launched 105 missiles targeting what they said were three chemical weapons facilities in Syria in retaliation for a suspected poison gas attack in Douma on April 7.

"Ten days ago, President Trump was saying 'the United States should withdraw from Syria'. We convinced him it was necessary to stay," Macron said in an interview broadcast by BFM TV, RMC radio and Mediapart online news.

"We convinced him it was necessary to stay for the long term."

The United States, Britain and France said they only hit Syria's chemical weapons capabilities and the strikes were not aimed at toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad or intervening in the civil war.

Limiting the strikes to these specific targets was not necessarily Trump's initial plan, Macron said.

"We also persuaded him that we needed to limit the strikes to chemical weapons (sites), after things got a little carried away over tweets," he said.

While it is unusual for a French president to present himself as driving U.S. policy in military matters in the Middle East, Macron and Trump have developed a friendly relationship over the past year. - Reuters