国际英语新闻：Wall Street trades mixed on economic data

NEW YORK, Sept. 16 (Xinhua) -- Wall Street traded mixed on Thursday as investors digested economic data.

Wall Street opened lower in the morning as investor worried that U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's speech on China's currency may hurt the economic relations between the two nations.

The Labor Department said Thursday that the number of people filing for jobless benefits fell to 450,000 last week, while analysts were expecting a modest rise.

The initial claims have been hovered at this level for the most time of this year, showing employers were still reluctant to hire.

Meanwhile, a separate report showed prices at the wholesale level rose more than expected last month, which could be causing some of the concern for traders.

The Producer Price Index rose 0.4 percent in August because of rising energy costs, higher than economists had anticipated.

Adding to the pressures, manufacturing activity in the Philadelphia region contracted in September for a second straight month. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, its index rose to minus 0.7 from the minus 7.7 level in August, but still stayed in contraction area.

The deficit in a broad measure of U.S. trade rose to 123.3 billion U.S. dollars in the second quarter of this year, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced on Thursday.

The increase represented a fourth consecutive quarterly rise of the U.S. current-account deficit -- the combined balances on trade in goods and services, income and net unilateral current transfers.

U.S. goods export gained 3.4 percent to 316.1 billion U.S. dollars in the second quarter, according to the latest data, while U.S. goods imports in the same period expanded by a even bigger margin at 6.3 percent to 485.7 billion U.S. dollars.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 17.14, or 0.16 percent, to 10,555.59. The Standard & Poor's 500 index slipped 4.65 points, or 0.41 percent, to 1,120.42 and the Nasdaq was down 8.62 points, or 0.37 percent, to 2,292.70.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose more than 5 percent in the first half of September, as the latest economic data showed the U.S. economy was recovering at a slow pace.