(New York) Equity markets managed to claw back some ground on Friday, with new disappointing macroeconomic figures giving traders hope for a less brutal monetary tightening.
Posted yesterday at 8:44 a.m.
The European stock markets ended the first session of the semester slightly up: Paris gained 0.14%, Frankfurt 0.23% and Milan 0.29%, London having ended in equilibrium (-0.01%).
On Wall Street, the Dow Jones rose 1.05%, the tech-heavy NASDAQ index 0.90% and the broader S&P 500 index 1.06%.
After early trading up, US markets were first caught up by the release of US manufacturing activity growth in June, which was the weakest since June 2020.
“This makes several leading indicators of growth which are not good”, notes Frédéric Rollin, of Pictet AM. In particular, he recalls the consumer confidence indices, the results of which have worried investors in recent days.
However, despite these poor figures, the New York market is back in the green and even accelerated at the end of the session, the first of the second half.
“The idea that’s going around is that bad news will become good news for equities,” said Jack Ablin of Cresset Capital.
The reasoning would say that “the bad news [économiques] will help keep interest rates low and lead to lower demand and more contained inflation,” he argued.
In this context, “there is a growing impression that the Fed [banque centrale américaine] is not going to be as aggressive as she had announced, ”continued the analyst.
The mood spilled over into the bond market, which has seen rates contract sharply since Tuesday. The yield on 10-year US government bonds thus stood at 2.89%, against 3.20% on Tuesday.
Rise in oil and the dollar
Oil prices rose again on Friday, supported by production outages in Libya and Ecuador, but also by the prospect of a long holiday weekend of travel in the United States.
The barrel of Brent from the North Sea for delivery in September, which is the first day of use as a benchmark contract, ended up 2.38% at 111.63 dollars.
The barrel of American West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for delivery in August, climbed more strongly, by 2.52% to 108.43 dollars.
The dollar, a safe haven for the money market, rose by 0.62% against the euro, to 1.0429 dollars, and by 0.65% against the pound sterling to 0.8267 pounds for one dollar.
Bitcoin rebounded 4.21% to $19,532.