Wall Street rebounded in March even as worries grew over Ukraine and inflation.

Inflation accelerated, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grew more intense, the Federal Reserve started to cool down the economy and some investors began to wonder if a recession is looming.

The stock market, though, managed to end March with a gain.

The S&P 500 rose 3.6 percent for the month, snapping back after stocks had plunged to start the year. The turnaround means that the S&P 500 has clawed back more than half of its losses from the lowest point of 2022, when it was down 12.5 percent.

This turn of events is a somewhat predictable reaction to Wall Street’s worst stretch of selling since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. The rebound came as stock investors realized that their worst fears about the economy hadn’t materialized, analysts said. The economy continued to show signs of strength in the face of new challenges, and the Fed’s long-awaited plan for interest rates fit in neatly with investors’ expectations. And many businesses said they were able to deal with record inflation by passing rising costs along to consumers — boosting their profits in the process.

“People realized that the fundamentals behind a lot of the stocks are really not that bad and that companies are still extremely profitable,” said Victoria Greene, chief investment officer at G Squared Private Wealth, an advisory firm.

“Hard corrections like we had in January and February tend to be like strong summer storms,” she said. They are “intense but tend to pass quickly.”

That’s not to say that financial markets are completely sanguine about the state of the world. If the Fed proves too aggressive in its effort to contain inflation, or if it suddenly shifts its plan, the central bank could spook investors in risky assets like stocks. And the conflict in Ukraine, which has led to thousands of civilian deaths and the displacement of millions, adds a high degree of uncertainty.

On Thursday, for example, the S&P 500 ended with a loss of 1.6 percent after tumbling in the final hours of trading. For the first three months of the year, the index ended down 5 percent.

But the panic that gripped stock investors earlier in the year has certainly eased. That’s partly because several indicators showed that the American economy was still faring well. Employers added 678,000 jobs in February, and a report for March to come on Friday was expected to show that the robust pace of hiring has continued. That employment growth is keeping consumers spending even as prices shoot higher.

Businesses have capitalized on this consumer behavior. As they reported results for the end of 2021, companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s said they raised prices, boosting revenue without seeing a reduction in demand.

The fallout from the war in Ukraine also lifted shares of some companies. As oil prices surged, major oil producers rallied. The best performer among them was Occidental Petroleum, which climbed about 30 percent in March and has risen 47 percent since the invasion began on Feb. 24. The defense company Lockheed Martin is also up more than 13 percent since the start of the war.

Investors also bid up shares of some of the biggest technology companies, after share prices were hammered amid the panic over whether high interest rates would squelch interest in risky investments. Apple climbed 15.9 percent from its lowest point in March, while Tesla rose 40.6 percent. Because of their size — Apple’s gains have lifted its valuation to close to $3 trillion again — the big technology companies can carry the entire S&P 500 higher. Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta were also higher in March.

Wall Street’s gain this month came even as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in efforts to ease inflation by making borrowing costs more expensive. The central bank rolled out its first quarter-point rate increase in the middle of the month and projected six more increases this year. With inflation already running at its fastest pace in 40 years, and after the Fed signaled that it was teeing up a rate increase, investors expected the move.

But last week, the Fed’s chair, Jerome H. Powell, spurred new concerns when he said that the Fed was prepared to raise rates more quickly if necessary. Economists are worried that a more rapid approach in raising interest rates could lead the economy into a recession by slowing down consumer demand too much.

“The fear is that it’s always hard to know how many rate hikes will just slow the economy or whether it may go a bit too far and tip the economy into a recession,” said Franziska Palmas, a markets economist at Capital Economics. “There’s so many things going on in the economy that it’s not that easy for the central bank to calibrate exactly the right amount of tightening.”

As stocks rallied though, it was the bond market that signaled rising recession fears by narrowing the difference between short-term interest rates and long-term ones. In a growing economy, short-term interest rates are usually notably lower than long-term ones. For example, at the start of the year, the yield on 2-year Treasury notes stood at 0.78 percent, while the yield on 10-year Treasury notes was 1.63 percent.

Now, the two interest rates are nearly the same at about 2.3 percent. This type of move usually indicates that investors anticipate a slowdown in growth in the near future.

“If investors as a whole believe that interest rates will be flat or lower in the years ahead relative to today’s rates, it suggests the markets are pricing in a weakening economy,” said John Canavan, lead analyst at Oxford Economics.

Those predictions of a slowdown ramped up as oil prices soared, raising the prospect that inflation could persist. Oil prices surged above $130 a barrel as Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia, a major oil producer, and businesses suspended their operations in the country. The United States banned imports of Russian energy, and European nations pledged to gradually follow suit.

But oil fell off those highs, and that helped bolster stocks. By Thursday, after the Biden administration said it would release up to 180 million barrels of oil from its strategic petroleum reserve in the coming months, global oil prices stood at around $108 a barrel.