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FILE PHOTO: The German DAX index in Frankfurt
For Sruthi Shankar, Bansari Mayur Kamdar and Susan Mathew
March 9 (Archyde.com) – German stocks soared almost 8% and led strong gains in European stock markets on Wednesday, as investors returned to depressed stocks after falling on fears of the fallout from the crisis. Ukraine.
* Italian and French shares rose about 7% each, while the pan-European STOXX 600 index advanced 4.7% in its best session in two years.
* The STOXX 600 snapped a four-day losing streak during which it fell nearly 7%, hurt by the threat of a ban on Russian oil imports.
* On Tuesday, German and Italian stocks closed 20% below their recent highs, a decline investors call a “bear market.”
* Shares of banks, automakers and travel and leisure companies rose more than 7%.
* News that Russia and Ukraine were willing to talk boosted confidence and fueled a rally in world stocks.
* “The fact that Western governments appear to be waging an economic war against Russia, rather than a military conflict, has helped overall sentiment,” said David Madden, market analyst at Equiti Capital.
* Germany’s DAX, which has suffered the most among regional indices due to companies’ exposure to Russian energy supply, posted its biggest daily percentage gain since March 2020.
* Banks in the euro zone rose almost 10%, but are still down 13% in the year due to uncertainty about the plans to tighten monetary policy by the European Central Bank (ECB), as well as the economic hit by the Ukraine crisis.
* The ECB is due to meet on Thursday, with its boss, Christine Lagarde, likely to argue that it can keep a check on euro zone inflation, which has already jumped to 5.8%, the highest figure in the two decades of the bloc.
(Reporting by Sruthi Shankar, Bansari Mayur Kamdar and Susan Mathew in Bengaluru; Editing in Spanish by Javier López de Lérida)