(Reuters) – U.S. Stock Index Futures rose Friday as investors awaited data on jobs to confirm labor market strength, and give clues about the U.S. Federal Reserve’s pace for interest rate increases.

Closely watched by the Labor Department, this report on employment is due to be released at 8:30 am. ET will show an expected increase of almost 500,000 jobs for March. This is in addition to the unemployment rate dropping to 3.7% (a record low) and wages rising.

This may allow the Fed to hike interest rates 50 basis points more in May.

Last month, the U.S. central banking raised its policy rate 25 basis points. This is the first increase in policy rates since 2018. Policymakers are increasingly ready to signal their willingness for more aggressive interest rate increases to counter decades of high inflation.

Rate-sensitive banks like Bank of America (NYSE:), Goldman Sachs (NYSE:), JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE:), Citigroup (NYSE:), Morgan Stanley (NYSE: Wells Fargo (NYSE:) & Co rose more than 1% in premarket trading.

Russia permitted gas to continue flowing to Europe Friday, in spite of a deadline for buyers who had to pay in Russian rubles. Talks resumed with Moscow stating that it would accept a Ukrainian proposal.

Stocks were buoyed by hopes of a potential peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine earlier this week, but the optimism soon wore off with each index suffering its largest quarterly decline since 2002.

At 07:21 AM. ET were up 160 points or 0.466% and up 19.5 points or 0.43% respectively. They were also up 65.25 or 0.44%.

In the hour ending on Thursday trading, the index fell 1.2%. This is the biggest hourly decline in three weeks. Traders blame a huge quarterly options trade by JPMorgan as one reason.

Megacap stocks include Tesla (NASDAQ) Inc, Amazon.com. (NASDAQ) Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ;), Meta Platforms and Apple Inc (NASDAQ) were all acquired by Alphabet Inc.

GameStop Corp The stock of (NYSE:), which was the centre of an unprecedented social media-fueled trading frenzy in 2013, jumped 15.7% after videogame retailer, Videogames Direct, announced that it will seek approval from shareholders for a stock splitting.