NEW YORK (AP) - U.S. stocks struggled for direction early Tuesday, ricocheting between small gains and losses.
Encouraging data about growth in the U.S. service industry, which includes industries like retail and restaurants, pushed the market up. But Europe wasn't far from anyone's mind, as world finance chiefs held an emergency conference call to discuss how to rein in the continent's troubled countries as they hurtle toward a financial cliff.
The Dow Jones industrial average was down as much as 29 points in early trading, bounced to a gain of 35 points after the service-industry report, then slowed to a gain of nine points, to 12,110, at around 11:20 a.m.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index was up four to 1,282, and the Nasdaq composite index was up eight to 2,768.
The Institute for Supply Management reported that U.S. service companies, which employ roughly 90 percent of the work force, grew at a slightly faster pace in May, marking the 29th straight month of expansion.
But Europe's debt problems, which sent the Dow to a 275-point plunge on Friday, continued to weigh heavily on Wall Street.
The German finance minister said he would oppose watering down budget cuts that stronger countries like his own want to impose on weaker countries like Greece. Spain's finance minister said the amount of money that would be needed to prop up the nation's banking sector was not excessively high. Greece's central bank governor said Cyprus was struggling to find about $2 billion to inject into its second-largest bank.