While you were sleeping: UPDATED Oil, US earnings lift Wall Street

Wall Street moved higher with oil prices and better-than-expected US corporate earnings including from Facebook.

Oil prices rose amid fresh reports about efforts to lower the global glut between the world's top producers. But Opec poured cold water on an Interfax report that it had scheduled a meeting with Russia to discuss a coordination in output cuts.

"It's possible that Russia could be testing the waters to gauge how Opec members would respond to the idea of cuts," Jason Bordoff, director of the Centre on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former senior oil official at the White House, told Bloomberg.

Oil last traded above $US33 a barrel, having pared some of its earlier gains.

"Oil's been firmly in control of the market," Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh, told Reuters. "I think what oil has become is a proxy for 'are we going into a recession?'"

Dow climbs 125 points
On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 125.18 points, or 0.8%, to 16,069.64, while the Nasdaq Composite Index climbed 0.9% to 4506 and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index rose 05% to 1893.

Rallies in shares of Caterpillar and those of Chevron Corp, last up 3.7% and 3% respectively, led the Dow higher. Bucking the trend were slides in shares of American Express and those of Merck, down 3.7% and 2.1% respectively.

Shares of Facebook soared, last up 15.9%, after the company posted results that surpassed expectations.

Also pleasing investors with their latest earnings were PayPal and Under Armour, last up 7.6% and 19.9% respectively.

Shares of Amazon, which is set to report after the market close, last traded 6.8% higher.

A day after the Federal Reserve said it expects to raise interest rates gradually, a report showed orders for all durable goods sank 5.1% in December, the largest drop since August 2014.

"US companies are cutting investment sharply, and the key worry is that it seems to be spreading beyond the oil sector and in the meantime consumers are missing in action, not able to offset the huge drag from the energy sector," Thomas Costerg, a US economist at Standard Chartered Bank in New York, told Reuters.

US GDP expected to slow
A report on Friday is expected to show that fourth-quarter gross domestic product rose at a 0.8% annual rate, down from a 2% pace in the third quarter.

In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index finished the day with a 1.6% drop from the previous close, amid disappointing corporate earnings including from Roche. The UK's FTSE 100 Index declined 1%, France's CAC 40 Index fell 1.3%, while Germany's DAX Index slid 2.5%.

"Risk appetite is still very fragile," William Hobbs, head of investment strategy at Barclays' wealth-management unit in London, told Bloomberg. "Right now, its a matter of guilty till proven innocent in terms of whether or not the world is on the cusp of the next economic downturn. And the latest European earnings have been mixed."

Meanwhile, a report says consumer prices in Germany dropped in January, sliding 0.9% from December. That's the largest fall in a year.

UPDATED for Wall Street close (10am NZ time)

(BusinessDesk)