EUROPEAN STOCK EXCHANGES OPEN LOWER
PARIS (Archyde.com) – Major European stock markets fell in early trading on Monday as concerns about inflation and interest rate speculation continued to urge investors to be cautious.
In Paris, the CAC 40 lost 1.2% to 6,417.78 points around 07:45 GMT. In London, the FTSE 100 lost 0.4% and in Frankfurt, the Dax dropped 1.36%.
The EuroStoxx 50 index is down 1.25%, the FTSEurofirst 300 0.5% and the Stoxx 600 0.77%.
The latter has already fallen by 0.8% over the whole of last week and the CAC 40 by 0.89%.
Investors should avoid risk-taking until Friday and the speech that Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, is to deliver at the traditional seminar in Jackson Hole.
In the meantime, the markets will watch the “flash” PMI indices on Tuesday, which could confirm the risk of recession in the euro zone, then on Thursday the minutes of the July meeting of the European Central Bank.
The latter is all the more expected as several ECB officials have stressed in recent days the need to continue tightening monetary policy. The latest, Joachim Nagel, President of the Bundesbank, thus judged in an interview published on Saturday that the probability of inflation exceeding forecasts was increasing.
The decline in equities is also explained by a further decline in oil prices in the face of fears of deterioration in global demand: the price of a barrel of Brent fell 1.26% to 95.50 dollars and the Stoxx index of oil and gas yields 0.87%.
More broadly, cyclical stocks are struggling: the automotive sector fell by 2.14%, that of banks by 1.41% and that of industry by 1.3%.
In Paris, ArcelorMittal drops 2.78%, the biggest drop in the CAC 40, while Renault loses 2.58% and Societe Generale 2.62%. The only two increases in the index are for Engie (+1.42%) and Sanofi, which picked up 1.05% after a fall of 16.3% over the last two weeks.
(Writing by Marc Angrand, editing by Kate Entringer)