Stocks move higher ahead of the closing bell, Fed rate decision this week

Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss how stocks are trading into the closing bell on Monday.

Video transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: All right, just a few minutes away from the closing bell. Let's break down the market action as we can see a lot of green on the board. In particular, look at the Dow, the leader on the day, up 1.2% just about. The S&P 500 rising 34 points, just less than 1%. And the NASDAQ has continued to increase a bit towards the close. A terrific week last week, best since January for the NASDAQ.

And just when you think the markets are going to fall based on all this uncertainty, based on all the stress in our banking system, perhaps not. Perhaps they're seeing no Fed rate hike at the next meeting. I'm not sure what the sentiment is there. What do you make of it?

SEANA SMITH: I don't know what the sentiment is. I think everyone's trying to figure out just in terms of what that contagion risk looks like when we take a look at the latest developments coming out of the banking sector. Yes, the fact that UBS did buy Credit Suisse-- yes, the fact that, according to reports, there might be a second plan under consideration to try and help shore up some of the concern at First Republic Bank, you would think that that would help ease some of those jitters out there on the Street, Dave.

But when you take into account some of the losses, though, that we've seen over the last two weeks-- yes, the SPDR, the regional banking ETF KRE, did gain, what, just about 1 and 1/2% today, but it did fall nearly 15% last week. So we still have a ways to go to get back to some of those levels that we were seeing two weeks ago.

DAVE BRIGGS: Yeah, and you bring up the new report from the "Wall Street Journal" about JPMorgan, part of that group that could stabilize First Republic. But after that report was broken by the "Wall Street Journal," First Republic, which we'll talk about more later on the program, has continued to fall after that news and is now down 47%. I think it was down around 40% to 42% when that news broke. So that may have reassured the markets overall but not investors in First Republic. So that story continues to evolve day by day, minute by minute.