LONDON — The
Paris stock market and the euro rose on
Monday, with investors soothed by
French President Emmanuel Macron’s election
performance.
اضافة اعلان
Frankfurt and London equities however followed Asian
exchanges lower, with sentiment souring on flat UK economic growth.
Wall Street opened on the downside as traders looked
ahead to inflation data due out on Tuesday, growth worries and the prospect of
more aggressive US interest rate hikes.
Oil prices tumbled
more than five percent at one point on Chinese demand fears arising from
COVID-19 lockdowns, and on dimming hope of a European embargo on Russian crude,
dealers said.
“It is above all
the bad news from China that is weighing on prices, as the number of COVID
cases continues to surge,” said Commerzbank analyst Barbara Lambrecht.
Shanghai eased restrictions on some neighborhoods on
Monday after mounting outcry over China’s inflexible COVID-19 rules, which
locked down 25 million people.
“The lockdowns that are slowing oil demand in the
world’s second-largest consumer country threaten to persist for even longer,”
added Lambrecht.
‘Solid result’
Macron topped
France’s first-round presidential vote on Sunday, leading
far-right rival Marine Le Pen by a larger-than-expected margin.
Emmanuel Macron won
27.85 percent of votes in the first round of France’s presidential election,
while far-right leader Marine Le Pen scored 23.15 percent, according to final
results.
“A solid result for
incumbent Emmanuel Macron ... has helped to allay fears of a
Le Pen
presidency,” said economist Jessica Hinds at research consultancy Capital
Economics.
“But the latest
polls still point to a very tight race.”
Investors had
fretted about the implications of a victory for Le Pen in the midst of the war
in Ukraine, given her long-standing sympathies for Russia.
“All attention will now turn to the second round on
April 24, and the big question for that will be where the supporters of the
defeated first-round candidates go,” wrote Deutsche Bank analysts in a client
note.
On the downside,
London stocks slid on official data showing that the UK economy had ground to a
near halt in February, growing by just 0.1 percent.
Dollar eyes 2002 yen
peak
Elsewhere, the dollar hit a 2015 high at 125.77 yen on expectations of
more US Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, in contrast with the Bank of
Japan’s loose policy.
That was not far
from the greenback’s two-decade peak of 125.86 yen.
The Fed has
recently taken a hawkish tone as it embarks on an aggressive tightening path to
counter runaway inflation.
In China,
factory-gate inflation was higher than expected in March, official data showed,
as
Russia’s war on Ukraine pushes up oil prices while a domestic COVID-19
resurgence strains food supplies and consumer costs.
The producer price
index — measuring the cost of goods at the factory gate — grew 8.3 percent
on-year, National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) figures showed.
In Jakarta, Indonesia’s biggest tech firm GoTo soared on its
debut after a billion-dollar IPO — the world’s fifth-biggest this year.
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