Stock Futures Point to Wall Street Gains

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Stock futures were drifting higher Tuesday on a light economic calendar day as investors latched onto calls by a Federal Reserve official to launch an aggressive bond-buying program.

Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average were up 40 points, or 45.49 points above fair value, at 13,107. Futures for the S&P 500 were up 6.4 points, or 6.37 points above fair value, at 1396. Futures for the Nasdaq were rising 18 points, or 15.36 points above fair value, at 2705.

Eric Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the Fed should launch an aggressive, open-ended bond buying program that the central bank would continue until economic growth picks up and unemployment starts falling again.

Rosengren said the Fed should buy more mortgage-backed securities and possibly U.S. Treasury securities, and make it clear that it will continue to buy bonds "until we start seeing some pretty significant improvements in growth and income," the newspaper reported.

Investor optimism stemming from last week's better-than-expected jobs report carried over into Monday's quiet session with traders getting no new domestic economic data to chew over and few earnings headlines to key on as second-quarter reporting season winds down.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average wavered in the final hour of trading but still managed to finish Monday with a gain for the first time since May.

The economic calendar in the U.S. Tuesday includes consumer credit for June, due at 3 p.m. EDT. Economists, according to Briefing.com, are calling for a $10 billion increase on the heels of May's surprise $17.1 billion jump.

"We have consumer credit numbers from the U.S. today, which should continue to demonstrate reasonable expansion," said Paul Donovan, a global economist at UBS. "U.S. banks seem increasingly willing to lend money, and U.S. consumers seem increasingly willing to borrow money. The U.S. financial system is hardly undergoing a credit boom, but the willingness of the banking system to transmit monetary policy is clear."