Earnings due later from streaming giant Netflix (NFLX.O), industrial heavyweight General Electric (GE.N) and drinks firm PepsiCo (PEP.O) were also on investors' radar.
With Netflix having outperformed the S&P 500 year-to-date by a sizeable 33 percentage points and analysts still bullish the firm "will need to blow the lights out with a solid beat and raise," Chris Weston, head of research at broker Pepperstone said.
Wall Street futures were pointing to fractionally higher start later.
European stocks were up a comfortable 0.7% after its four-day run of fall while Japan's Nikkei (.N225) and bluechip markets in Taiwan (.TWII) and China (.CSI300) had all notched 0.3%-0.6% rises overnight.
Ending what would have been the biggest foreign takeover of a Japanese company, Canadian retailer Alimentation Couche-Tard (ATD.TO), citing a lack of constructive engagement by the operator of 7-Eleven convenience stores.
Shares of Seven & i Holdings (3382.T) slid to a three-month low and ended down over 9%.
Trump's quick denial of the Powell speculation had helped restore some calm to volatile markets, but he kept the door open to the possibility of ousting him and renewed his criticism of the central bank chief for not cutting U.S. interest rates.
"After yesterday’s scare, markets have probably built even more resistance to headlines on this topic" ING analyst Francesco Pesole said. But, "in that hour, we saw the reaction we would have expected: a steepening in the U.S. yield curve, and the dollar sharply lower."
Shorter-term Treasury yields had fallen due to the expectations that any Powell replacement would be an ultra-dove and lead to quicker and deeper rate cuts.
The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield was little changed at 4.4714% in European trading on Thursday, while German Bund yields were a steady 2.695%, having touched their highest since late March earlier this week.
In the commodity markets, Brent oil prices rose as much as 0.4% to $68.78 a barrel and safe-haven metal gold slipped 0.5% to $3,331 an ounce.
Reporting by Marc Jones
Reuters report
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