World financial news

U.S. stocks were little changed this week.

The CHART OF THE DAY shows the swings in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index that left the equity benchmark up 0.3 percent since Sept. 12. That's the smallest weekly move for the S&P 500 in a month, even as it posted the biggest daily plunges in seven years and the steepest two-day surge since the aftermath of the October 1987 stock-market crash.

The index tumbled more than 4.7 percent twice after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s bankruptcy, Bank of America Corp.'s takeover of Merrill Lynch & Co. and the government seizure of American International Group Inc. The S&P 500 ended the week by jumping 8.5 percent in two days on the government's plan to purge banks of bad assets and crack down on short sellers bad credit payday loans.

“We moved around a lot to get nowhere,'' said Douglas Peta, a New York-based market strategist at J&W Seligman & Co., which manages about $20 billion. “If you were away for a week and just came back and looked at the indexes, you'd say to the person next to you, `nothing happened while I was gone, huh?'''

The S&P 500 added 3.38 points to 1,255.08 this week.

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