MILANO – European stock exchanges weaken in the second part of the session and all closed down in a week all focused on central bank meetings, with the directors of the Fed, the ECB, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan who will communicate their monetary policy decisions to counter the rise in inflation between Wednesday and Friday. The spotlight is in particular on the US, with the Fed likely announcing an acceleration in the tightening already announced, opening to a first rate cut as early as spring.
To darken the mood of the markets in particular the spread of the Omicron variant. In the United Kingdom the word of the first Boris Johnson, who spoke of “tide” coming in they pushed the GBP to the downside, down to $ 1.3222. New negative record for the Turkish lira which broke the threshold of 1 dollar for 14 lire and 1 euro for 16 lire, losing about 3% of its value. The euro is back below 1.13 (1.129 from 1.1315 on Friday evening).
At the close of trading, Milano the 0.64% yields, London lo 0.83%, Frankfurt 0.02% e Paris loses 0.7%. The opening in the red of Wall Street weighs on investor mood, with the Dow Jones falling by 0.81%, the Nasdaq 1.18%.
Mixed closing for the Asian sector this morning with Tokyo (+ 0.71%) positive together with Shanghai (+0,4%) e Sidney (+ 0.35%), while they sold Taiwan (-0,33%) e Only (-0,28%).
While Istat tracks a recovery of about half a million employees in the third quarter, but with a strong push from forward contracts, the spread between BTPs and German Bunds rose to 130.4 points, with the annual yield on ten-year bonds down by 2.3 points to 0.938%.
Oil prices are turning down, held back by fears related to Omicron and the effectiveness of vaccines against the new variant of Covid. At the end of the morning, Brent lost 0.73% to 74.60 dollars a barrel, and futures on US crude oil fell 0.75% to 71.13 dollars a barrel. Concerns over the new variant of the coronavirus and its impact on global growth and fuel demand weigh heavily. Meanwhile, OPEC, in the monthly report, left unchanged its forecast of growth in global oil demand in 2022 at 4.2 million barrels per day. And it also kept the estimate for 2021 unchanged at 5.7 million barrels per day. In the report, OPEC also estimates that the impact of the Omicron variant on crude oil demand will be “limited and short-lived”.
Instead they keep running European gas prices after the threats of the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko to block transit to Europe in the event of more severe sanctions against Minsk. At the Dutch hub TTF, prices jumped 11% to € 117.4 per Mwh, while UK prices rose 10.8% to £ 2.98 per therm.
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