Ris­ing con­sumer spend­ing boost­ed US stocks on yes­ter­day, and Wall Street closed its best first quar­ter since 1998. The Dow Jones in­dus­tri­al av­er­age rose 66.22 points to close at 13,212.04. The Stan­dard & Poor's 500 in­dex rose 5.19 points to close at 1,408.47. The Nas­daq com­pos­ite bare­ly moved, falling 3.79 points to close at 3,091.57.

For the quar­ter, the Dow post­ed an 8 per­cent gain and the S&P a 12 per cent gain, the best for those in­dices in 14 years. The gain was 19 per cent for the Nas­daq, its best since 1991. The Com­merce De­part­ment said con­sumer spend­ing rose in Feb­ru­ary at the fastest rate in sev­en months. Strong hir­ing over the past three months has added up to the best jobs growth in two years, putting more peo­ple back to work.

Amer­i­cans spent more even though their in­come has stag­nat­ed for two months af­ter tax­es and in­fla­tion. Some of the in­creased spend­ing has gone to gaso­line, which is the most ex­pen­sive on record for this time of year. Oil prices rose again on Fri­day, up 23 cents in New York to US$103.02 per bar­rel.

Nine out of 10 in­dus­try groups in the S&P 500 rose. The biggest-gain­ing cat­e­go­ry was en­er­gy stocks, al­though re­fin­ers fell be­cause of the high­er oil prices. Health care stocks rose, too, with two of the biggest gain­ers be­ing health in­sur­ers Unit­ed­Health Group Inc. and Well­Point Inc. Tech­nol­o­gy stocks fell slight­ly.

Some of the buy­ing could be dri­ven by end-of-the-quar­ter ef­forts by fund man­agers to get in­to stocks now that they have be­come pop­u­lar again, said Jim Rus­sell, a re­gion­al in­vest­ment di­rec­tor for US Bank Wealth Man­age­ment. And in­di­vid­ual in­vestors who have been re­ly­ing on bonds ap­pear to be get­ting back in­to the mar­ket, too, he said.

"We are very heart­ened to see the re­tail in­vestor stop play­ing one key on the pi­ano - that is, all bonds, all the time," he said. Ap­ple fell 1.7 per cent af­ter a com­pa­ny that makes its iPhones and iPads said it would ef­fec­tive­ly raise per-hour wages at its fac­to­ries in Chi­na, sug­gest­ing that man­u­fac­tur­ing prices could rise.

Shares of Black­Ber­ry mak­er Re­search in Mo­tion Ltd. rose 6.6 per cent a day af­ter the Cana­di­an com­pa­ny said it would re­turn to fo­cus­ing on cor­po­rate cus­tomers and shake up its man­age­ment to try to get prof­its grow­ing again. Corn prices surged 6.6 per cent on news that sup­pli­ers are tighter than pre­vi­ous­ly thought. High­er corn plus high­er oil prices points to­ward high­er food prices. Gro­cer stocks fell: Su­per­valu Inc. was down 3.7 per cent, and Safe­way Inc. fell 1.3 per cent.

Best Buy closed down 4.4 per cent as in­vestors con­tin­ued to di­gest its plan to cut stores and staff as it shifts to­ward small­er stores in an ef­fort to com­pete with on­line re­tail­ers. Best Buy stock lost al­most 7 per cent on Thurs­day. Sports ap­par­el mak­er Fin­ish Line Inc. fell 16 per cent af­ter it pre­dict­ed a low­er-than-ex­pect­ed first-quar­ter prof­it.

Eu­ro­pean mar­kets bounced back af­ter a rocky week that in­clud­ed a na­tion­al strike in Spain. On Fri­day, the coun­try un­veiled a draft 2012 bud­get that seeks to cut the deficit by US$36 bil­lion through spend­ing cuts and a tax hike on large com­pa­nies. But Spain al­so plans to cut gov­ern­ment min­istry spend­ing by an av­er­age of near­ly 17 per cent.

Ger­many's DAX closed up 1 per cent at 6,947, while the CAC-40 in France rose 1.3 per cent to 3,424. The FTSE 100 in­dex of lead­ing British shares was up 0.5 per cent to 5,768. The eu­ro rose half a pen­ny against the dol­lar, to US$1.3334. Asian mar­kets took a hit af­ter some poor fac­to­ry pro­duc­tion num­bers from Japan.

The yield on the bench­mark 10-year US Trea­sury note rose to 2.22 per cent from 2.16 per cent late Thurs­day. Trea­sury yields have risen two months in a row as in­vestors feel more com­fort­able mov­ing out of bonds.