Markets in Paris edged lower (-0.34%) on Friday as indicators underperformed, ending the week with investors worried about uncertainty over the central bank’s future monetary tightening.
The Paris Stock Exchange was down 22.11 points at 6,535.29 at around 10.10am, with the balance sheet quickly turning negative this week (-0.28%) after six straight weeks of gains.
If the previous day, Paris had closed Wednesday (+0.45%) on the back of encouraging macroeconomic indicators from the US, the session has recovered all of its gains since the start of the week, ahead of the Fed’s last In the “minutes” of the meeting, at the end of July, the agency raised interest rates by 75 basis points.
“Market participants are starting to realize that the U.S. central bank (Fed) policy doesn’t change immediately with every new stimulus,” said Comdirect analyst Andreas Lipkow.
In an interview published Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, James Bullard, chairman of the Federal Reserve’s St. Louis, Missouri, office known for his hawkish stance on monetary policy, said he favored raising rates by another 0.75 percentage point. The key rate is at the next meeting in September.
Several other members of the Fed have signaled their stance in favor of continuing to raise key interest rates at various levels.
However, according to CMC Markets’ Michael Hewson, “Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari’s comments were the most instructive.” Insist that the Fed needs to do more urgently to fight inflation, even at the cost of slowing the economy and the risk of triggering a recession.”
On the European front, “Inflation in the euro zone has not improved since the ECB raised interest rates in July,” said ECB Executive Board member Isabelle Schnabel, who favours a sharp hike next month, even as Ipek Ozkardeskaya, an analyst at Swissquote, stressed Say.
On Friday, Germany announced that its July producer prices rose 37.2% in a year, the biggest gain since 1949, according to the Federal Statistics Office. Prices are up 5.3% in just over a month.
In the UK, retail sales rebounded slightly in July, especially driven by online sales, but the long-term trend remains on a downward trend as inflation weighs on the UK budget.
Alstom balances on track
In addition to the 100 already purchased four years ago, SNCF has ordered another 15 new-generation TGVs from rail manufacturer Alstom to cope with increased traffic and to operate abroad. At the open, Alstom’s title was down 0.07% at 22.23 euros at around 10.15am.
Varneva loses hope
Fao Biotech Laboratories announced Thursday that it has begun submitting its chikungunya vaccine candidate to the U.S. health authorities (FDA) in a press release. On the first exchanges, its title was down 0.12% at 9.78 euros around 10.15am.