NEW YORK—Stocks rallied Thursday after a group of big banks offered a lifeline to the bank that investors had zeroed in on in their hunt for the industry’s next victim.
The S&P 500 jumped 1.8 percent for its best day in nearly two months after 11 of the biggest banks said they would deposit a combined $30 billion into First Republic Bank. The Dow Jones Industrial Average erased an early loss of 300 points to climb 371 points, or 1.2 percent, while the Nasdaq composite jumped 2.5 percent.
This week has been a whirlwind for markets globally on worries that banks may be bending under the weight of the fastest set of hikes to interest rates in decades. The concerns have been flaring since Friday’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which was the second largest bank failure in U.S. history….