With 48 hours to go before the end of the 1st half of the year, buyers are back in the driver's seat, after Wall Street clearly set the tone on Tuesday evening (a small pullback of 0.4% did nothing to change this).
The Paris stock market is quietly increasing its gains, to 0.9%, around 7280 points, driven in particular by Carrefour (+3.5%) and Saint-Gobain (+1.8%).

The Paris index thus follows in Wall Street's footsteps, buoyed yesterday by a number of statistics confirming the resilience of the US economy.

The announcement of a jump in new home sales, followed by a sharp rise in the consumer confidence index, largely underpinned the trend on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

Optimism about the possibility of avoiding a recession should bolster stock markets, as investors start to believe again in the possibility of a painless landing for the economy.

'Without a recession in the United States, a global recession is unlikely', say the teams at Evli, a Scandinavian asset management company.

A view shared by the strategists at Carmignac.

As long as the economy slows down without collapsing, and the pace of disinflation is maintained, keeping long-term interest rates in check, equity markets should remain on a crest line", says Kevin Thozet, one of the Paris-based investment fund's strategists.

But if global growth continues to show resilience in the short term, this also means that central banks will have to continue tightening policy in the months ahead.

For the ECB President, inflation remains too high in Europe, and the institution will have to continue its fight against rising prices 'whatever the cost'.
All is not rosy in Europe, despite the strength shown by the indices (E-Stoxx50, DAX and CAC at +0.9%): German household morale deteriorated as July approached, in a climate of heightened uncertainty regarding the country's economic prospects.

The index compiled by the GfK institute in Nuremberg, calculated from a sample of 2.000 people over the first part of the month just ended, sank to -25.4 points, compared with a revised figure of -24.4 in June.

This indicator shows that household confidence has been affected by the greater difficulty in saving expressed by households, primarily in the face of persistent inflationary pressures.

The sub-index measuring their income outlook fell by 2.4 points to -10.6, with consumers again believing that part of their real wages will be absorbed by high inflation.

Bond markets eased in the Eurozone, erasing the previous day's +5Pts tension with OATs improving to 2.844% and 2.315%.
US T-Bonds erased 3Pts to 3.74%, with no real market mover.

In French company news, Orpea reports that it has applied to Euronext Paris and the Luxembourg Stock Exchange to suspend the listing of all its financial instruments, pending the outcome of votes by the classes of affected parties on its accelerated safeguard plan.

TotalEnergies announced on Wednesday that it plans to invest 70 million euros in 2024 in its biorefinery at La Mède (Bouches-du-Rhône), with the aim of being able to process up to 100% waste from the circular economy to produce biofuels.

SES Space & Defense announces that its subsidiary DRS Global Enterprise Solutions (GES) has been awarded a five-year X-band blanket purchase contract, worth an estimated $134 million, from the US Department of Defense.

Finally, Thales announced on Wednesday that it has entered into a new partnership with Google Cloud to develop data protection functionalities based on generative artificial intelligence.

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