Stocks surged on Thursday after an eagerly awaited coronavirus relief package cleared the U.S. Senate and was headed for the House on Friday. By the end of the session, the S&P 500 clinched its third straight day of gains for the first time since mid-February. The Dow climbed more than 20% from its recent closing low of 18,591.93 from March 23.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: All right, welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. Myles Udland here in New York. Let's take a look at a huge rally we've got right now as we head towards the closing bell. Let's bring in Jared Blikre quickly for a look at what's going on. Jared, I mean, we've seen a lot of funny moves in the last 30 minutes of trading, and this is going to make the pantheon of what we've seen in the last couple weeks.

JARED BLIKRE: Yeah, I haven't been able to find the news item that sparked it. But we can see right here that we did get a pretty big surge in the last, I'd say, 10 minutes or so. And check this out. The Dow, if I go to a three-day chart, is going to be up about 20.7%. So according to some people, that means the Dow has exited the bear market and is, again, in a bull market. Simply incredible to do that round trip in one month.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah, and we're going to get to the panel in a bit. I see Andy Serwer shaking his head down in the bottom right of my screen. We'll talk about where we shake out when we get these final numbers. Just to give you an overview of what we're looking at right now, S&P sectors, we've got utilities leading the way here, up some 8.5%. Real estate catching a bit here. Obviously, a lot of broken REITs out there. We've seen some huge dislocations in bond ETFs and ETNs over the last few days. That's really-- or really last week, that's what the Fed kind of was hoping to correct with their announcement on a Sunday night.

Financials joining the party a little bit, up 6% today. But, obviously, still been left behind. Energy kind of right in the middle. We saw energy lead yesterday. And never a great sign when energy is leading [INAUDIBLE]. So to see energy names mid pack may be a little bit better. But crude oil prices, again, off 6%. And we've got about 10 seconds to go here in today's trading session.

[BELL RINGING]

[THUDDING]

[CLAPPING]

New York Stock Exchange, a floor, of course, that remains sans any traders at this time. Again, a huge rally on Wall Street today. And we saw just a huge spike. And I apologize for using the same superlative over and over, but it is kind of the only way to make sense of what we're seeing in this market after just a waterfall of selling over the last couple of weeks. The first three days of this week have seen two of the three most potent sessions you are going to see kind of anywhere now.

We know that tends to happen during bear markets. We tend to see these kinds of huge rallies. Remains to be seen where these rallies end up fitting into the broader market picture. I want to bring in my co-host Jen Rogers now for a little bit more, Jen, on just what you make of today's rally. I think in some sense-- and we've talked about this several times over the last couple of weeks-- there's not a ton to say kind of about a move like this. Because we know that we're probably in recession, we know there's a long way to go, but you do marvel at another 6% rally in the S&P and the Dow.

JEN ROGERS: I keep going back to Howard Marks from Oaktree, who we had on the show earlier this week, who said, "Nobody knows." And I think a lot of times, we don't exactly have a narrative for what's happening with the market. As Jared said, I don't know what the piece of news is that might have pushed us here, and we saw this happening in the last 10 minutes.

Boeing, of course, is the leader on the Dow. It is a-- it's not as huge a weight as it used to be. It was a $400 stock. It's still a $180 stock. Boeing up here more than $20. We all know this stock is up some 80% this week. And, folks, it's only Thursday. Walmart, which had been in the red when we started the show, getting above the flat line as well. Only Dow Inc to the downside today. But this is-- people are seeing these big shifts, and we've seen these on the close to the downside or the upside. And people want to get in.

MYLES UDLAND: Is it-- I thought it was Wednesday. Is it really Thursday?

JEN ROGERS: Oh, shoot. Is it only Wednesday?

MYLES UDLAND: I don't know.

JEN ROGERS: It's Thursday. I think it's Thursday, right?

MYLES UDLAND: I mean, at this point, they're all kind of the same. Let's bring in Yahoo Finance Editor in Chief Andy Serwer for more on today's market action. Andy, I saw-- I mentioned it earlier as I was going through today's rally. You're kind of shaking your head. And I think it's because, you know, we all can kind of feel, we all know in the back of our minds that there's more shoes to drop here as this whole virus progresses, as the market tries to figure out what this recession looks like. And maybe today feels good, but I think there's a little more danger in this market than today's rally would suggest.

ANDY SERWER: Oh, no doubt. You know, the stock market is an amazing forecasting mechanism, and I thought it did a terrific job, you know, the past couple weeks indicating that this coronavirus was going to be a real problem, that the economy was going to be suffering some incredible damage. We saw that with the jobs report today. Just an incredibly sickening number-- over 3.2 million jobs, jobless claims filed.

But, you know, in times like this, the disruption-- just sort of echoing what you and Jen were saying-- it doesn't make any sense. So it is best to really ignore this kind of stuff. I mean, this is the best three-day rally since 1931, which, of course, was in the middle of the Great Depression. So, you know, I was talking to a private equity guy last night on the phone who was just working all night long-- one of the biggest pension funds on the planet. And he was-- they're restructuring. They're trying to save companies.

So this is a total disconnect from what's going on in the stock market right now. You know, Jared Blikre will explain to us what was really going long with this late surge. There's all kinds of algorithmic trading going on, making this kind of stuff happening, but it is not an all clear sign at least to my mind.

MYLES UDLAND: Well, and I think-- it also-- you know, that conversation, Andy, gets to another topic of conversation that we've had and will have, which is that when an economy enters a recession, no matter how, why, when, who did it, what not, everything changes. You know, everything changes. All of a sudden, all sorts of areas that you thought were OK no longer are. And I think that's-- those are the ripples we're going to see through some of the bigger institutional areas of this market as we progress through the spring and the summer.

And let's go to Rick Newman now to talk a little bit more about some of those claims numbers you mentioned. And I guess, Rick, we start to just get a better picture of what this economy-- and, again, it's this weird thing. It's what the economy we knew looked like last week. Now it's being caught codified in the data. And I think it still is kind of incomprehensible that we had 3.3 million jobless claims last week.

RICK NEWMAN: We use the phrase "off the charts" as a cliche. This was literally off the charts. I mean, you had to literally enlarge the historical charts to fit that number, 3.3 million initial claims for unemployment insurance, on the charts. So somehow in the backward logic of the market, this is good news. I think we're still seeing a reaction to the big stimulus bill, which is, you know, still is not finalized, but I think will be finalized by the end of the week.

And Myles, another kind of interesting thing that has happened today is the White House has said they're going to start developing this system for ranking every county in the United States, whether it's low risk for coronavirus, medium risk, or high risk. Interesting idea. Possibly a very flawed idea. I think this is part of President Trump's thinking that if you can identify the areas in the country that seem to be the safest, well, then you can reopen the economy in those parts of the country.

The problem is there have been so many people carrying this virus who don't have symptoms or take time for the symptoms to develop, so you can't really be ranking county by county unless you're doing widespread testing so you know whether everybody without symptoms has it. However, it's an interesting idea. It's always better to have more data rather than less. So let's see where that one goes.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah, I think there's a lot of-- there's a need for a lot more data out of the White House and other arms of the government. And speaking of an arm of the government we've talked a lot about, Jay Powell, this morning, speaking on "The Today Show." And, you know, if you go back in time, Rick, we all remember when Jim Cramer went on "The Today Show"-- I think that was October, 2008-- and kind of made a big splash there and said, "If you don't need money in the next three years, you don't need to stop"-- whatever he said. He basically said sell everything. And I think it was really a watershed moment for the crisis.

Powell goes out today and says, we will not run out of ammunition. And we know what that means here, following it in the business media, but I do wonder what the general public thinks. They're like, who is this guy, and why is he talking about unlimited money? I thought that's not how the economy really works.

RICK NEWMAN: And that reminds me, something that has not happened lately-- you have not heard President Trump criticizing the Federal Reserve and Jay Powell lately, because they've cut interest rates essentially all the way to zero, the way Trump has been hammering on them to do. And then they did a bunch of other stuff that Trump probably can't even comprehend-- all the liquidity actions in the facilities meant to help businesses.

So, you know, the conventional thinking not long ago was the Fed's main monetary policy tool is interest rates, and what do they have after that? I mean, you know, we've been-- we talked for a long time. Oh, they're cutting rates again, so now they're not going to have any headroom left to cut further if we get into a recession. Well, that's true. They don't have any headroom left, but Powell is just using all the quantitative easing tricks and then some, and he's basic-- these are basically conventional monetary policy tools right now. I mean, it did work the last time, and we'll see if it works this time.