Jackson Free Press logo

This story originally appeared in the Jackson Free Press. It was added to the Mississippi Free Press website in 2025.
Note that any opinions expressed in legacy Jackson Free Press stories do not reflect a position of the Mississippi Free Press or necessarily of its staff and board members.

The New York Times is reporting:

A rescue plan for Citigroup turned into a boon for Wall Street on Monday, as stocks surged higher on the strength of financial firms buoyed by the government’s sweeping plan to assist the ailing banking giant.The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index soared 6.4 percent or 51.78 points, bringing its two-day gain to 12.8 percent and erasing all of last week’s painful losses. Those declines had worried investors, but the Citi plan appears to have placated those anxieties for now. “It’s big and it’s relevant. This is a big number,” said David Kovacs, chief quantitative investment officer at Turner Investment Partners, referring to the day’s gains.

The Dow Jones industrials jumped 396.97 points or 4.9 percent to close at 8,443.39, back to its level from last Wednesday. Shares of Citigroup — perhaps the gauge most widely watched on Monday — were 55 percent higher and traded above $6 a share for the first time since Thursday.

Monday’s session suggested that government’s actions to stanch the losses had passed a critical test of investor confidence. Few of the enormous federal bailout efforts over the last year have been met with such an unequivocally positive reaction.

MFP Solutions Lab logo

The Mississippi Free Press produced this story through the MFP Solutions Lab, supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. This series digs into Mississippi’s systemic issues and sheds light on responses to them in other communities. Beyond just reporting on problems, these stories interrogate their causes and inspect potential solutions.

Founding Editor Donna Ladd is a writer, journalist and editor from Philadelphia, Miss., a graduate of Mississippi State University and later the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she was an alumni award recipient in 2021. She writes about racism/whiteness, poverty, gender, violence, journalism and the criminal justice system. She contributes long-form features and essays to The Guardian when she has time, and was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Jackson Free Press. She co-founded the statewide nonprofit Mississippi Free Press with Kimberly Griffin in March 2020, and the Mississippi Business Journal named her one of the state's top CEOs in 2024. Read more at donnaladd.com, follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @donnerkay and email her at donna@mississippifreepress.org.