Stocks gain as confidence falls less than feared

In this file photo taken March 17, 2011, traders gather at a post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. World stocks fell Tuesday, March 29, on more bad news from Japan, where authorities raced to stop a radiation leak from a nuclear power plant damaged in an earthquake nearly three weeks ago. (AP Photo, file)

NEW YORK - Stocks edged higher Tuesday after consumer confidence fell less than some analysts had feared.

Home Depot Inc. rose 2.3 percent, the most of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones industrial average. The retailer said it would buy $1 billion of its own stock with cash from selling bonds.

Amazon Inc. rose 2.4 percent. The online retailer launched two offerings late Monday: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player. The first allows users to store music, videos and photos on Amazon's servers. The second lets users play songs uploaded on a computer

Rising gas prices helped drag down consumer confidence in March. The Conference Board said its confidence index dropped more than expected to 63.4 from 72 in February.

The fall comes after five straight months of gains, but some economists had expected the decline to be even worse. Goldman Sachs had forecast a drop to 60 after the University of Michigan confidence survey showed a steep fall last week.

The Conference Board survey also had a surprising result: the index measuring consumers' assessment of current conditions gained from February, putting it at the highest level since November 2008.

"Now, you can't say things are going worse than they were a month ago," said Thomas Simons, money market economist at Jefferies & Co.

The Dow rose 55 points, or 0.5 percent, to 12,252. The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 5, or 0.4 percent, to 1,314. The Nasdaq composite rose 18, or 0.6 percent,

to 2,748.

Evidence of higher gas prices hitting household spending showed up Monday in February's report from the Commerce Department. Consumer spending rose, but most of the increase was used to cover rising gas prices.

Rising oil prices have pushed gasoline prices up 25 cents in the past month. The national average for a gallon of gas hit $3.58 Monday. That's the highest price for this time of year.

Stocks started lower after a report showed that home prices fell in 19 of the 20 large U.S. cities tracked by the S&P/Case-Shiller index. Washington was the only city in which prices rose. Prices have fallen 3 percent overall in the past year.

Lennar Corp. fell 3.2 percent on news that housing prices dropped in most major cities even after the homebuilder reported a surprise profit for the latest quarter.

General Electric Co. rose 0.5 percent after announcing plans to buy 90 percent of Converteam, a France-based electrical equipment maker.

Denise Richards Kelly Monaco Alecia Elliott Samantha Mathis Danica Patrick