Stock market live | Ibex falls and loses 11,900 points in the midst of ECB hangover | Financial markets

AdminOctober 18, 2024

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Stock market live | Ibex falls and loses 11,900 points in the midst of ECB hangover | Financial markets

What does Ibex 35 do?

Stock markets will open the last session of the week on the negative side. Ibex 35 falls by 0.6% and loses 11,900 points. Yesterday the select fell 0.77%, weighed down by falls in banks and most major securities after the European Central Bank (ECB) cut interest rates by a quarter point. From Monday to Thursday, the Spanish selective gains 1.5%.

Which values rise or fall the most?

Those who rise the most:

Fluidra: 1.6%

ArcelorMittal: 1.4%

Acerinox: 1.1%

Values that fall the most:

Index: -1.3%

Telephonics: -1%

Cellnex: -0.9%

What are the rest of the stock markets doing?

The Nikkei index fell 0.02%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index added 1% and the Shanghai Composite index added 0.6%. Today the central bank officially launched a swap program aimed at stimulating the stock market.

Yesterday, Wall Street ended mixed, with tech stocks up sharply, led by chip maker Taiwan Semiconductor Company. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.37%, the benchmark S&P 500 fell 0.02% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 0.04%.

Keys of the day

Yesterday it was reported that weekly claims for unemployment benefits in the US fell from 260,000 to 241,000, and manufacturing activity rose from 1.7 to 10.3 points in October, according to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, in addition to an increase of 0.4 % of retail trade. September sales were one-tenth more than expected. These data showed the strength of the US economy and may affect the dynamics of rates in the country.
The ECB yesterday cut interest rates by a quarter point for the third time since the start of the year, the second in a row, with inflation “on track” and worse than expected economic activity, although it avoided making specific decisions for December.
The National Institute of Statistics (INE) will publish at 9:00 am information on the activities of the service sector and industrial turnover for August.
In Europe, the eurozone’s current account balance, UK retail sales and Spain’s trade balance stand out.
In the United States, data is being received on housing starts and building licenses.
China’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew 0.9% quarter-on-quarter in the July-September period, according to official data released Friday by the Asian country’s National Statistics Office (ONE). That’s slightly below the most common forecast among analysts, who expected a 1% rebound from the second quarter. On an annualized basis, the world’s second-largest economy grew 4.6% in the third quarter, beating expectations of 4.5% growth.
China’s industrial production rose 5.4% year on year in September, up 0.9 points from the previous month. The figure for the ninth month of the year also significantly exceeds the expectations of analysts, who predicted a slight increase to 4.6%.

What do analysts say?

Miguel Angel Garcia, investment director at Diaphanum: “The ECB’s decision on interest rates was not a surprise. There were no plans to revise economic data forecasts at this meeting. The President has not changed her speech and is subordinating the next rate cut to published economic data, ruling out that the eurozone will go into recession and that a soft landing is more likely. Consequently, he did not comment on whether a new rate cut would be decided at the next ECB meeting on December 12. In our view, the ECB should be more aggressive in cutting interest rates as expected eurozone growth is very low, less than 1%, and inflation has fallen in recent months. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen like a rise in inflation that they didn’t expect. Unlike the Fed, its goal is to bring inflation to 2%, unlike the US Federal Reserve whose goals are 2% inflation and maximizing employment. Despite this, it would be highly undesirable if this led the eurozone into stagflation.”

Hugo Le Damany and François Cabau, economists at AXA IM: “Beyond the higher-than-expected inflation trough in September, the ECB’s announcements were slightly biased toward weaker-than-expected activity. We continue to expect weak domestic demand to lead to headline inflation, which is expected to remain below the ECB’s target for most of 2025. This justifies (much) less restrictive monetary policy. Pending the release of more data ahead of the ECB’s December meeting, we are maintaining our base case scenario of sequential rate cuts of 25 basis points until June 2025. We cannot rule out that the ECB will decide on a larger step in December (or later).”