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Investors are cautious: the US Federal Reserve had raised interest rates by 0.50 percentage points, as expected
Photo: A3602 Frank Rumpenhorst/ dpa
With no prospect of an end to interest rate hikes in the foreseeable future, investors increasingly divested themselves of stocks on Thursday.
The leading German index, the Dax, increased its losses by 1.20 percent around midday to a level of 14,286 points.
The MDax lost 0.88 percent to 25,647 points, and the Eurozone leading index EuroStoxx 50 lost 1.3 percent in value.
As expected, the US Federal Reserve had raised interest rates by 0.50 percent the night before.
Investors are critical of the currency watchdog's projections, which point to further interest rate hikes.
The background is the still very high inflation, which the European Central Bank (ECB) also has to deal with.
That is why the interest rate decision by the ECB will be the main focus on Thursday, supplemented by those in Switzerland, Great Britain and Norway.
Deutsche Post
shares
lost significantly on Thursday.
With a minus of three percent, they brought up the rear in the also weaker Dax in early trading and tended towards the support of the past few weeks at EUR 37.50.
The US bank JPMorgan gave the logistician's papers "Negative Catalyst Watch" status.
According to JP Morgan, Swiss Post could lower medium-term targets with the presentation of annual figures for 2022.
In addition, the analysts expect freight rates to fall significantly in the coming year.
Positive price developments were rare in the three major indices of the Dax family.
In the leading index,
Deutsche Telekom
, which is valued by investors as a defensive investment, performed best at the previous day's level.
In the MDax,
Lufthansa
and Fraport were positive exceptions.
They continued their rallies with gains of up to 0.9 percent.
The losers' lists included stocks for which rising interest rates are seen as a problem.
This includes parts of the technology sector as well as online stocks, because higher financing costs can slow down the growth of companies.
Delivery Hero
lost 4.6 percent in the MDax.
From the SDax, the Auto1 titles fell by 6.2 percent.
Wall Street down
The New York Stock Exchange slipped back into the red on Wednesday.
The most important indices slipped into the red after the Fed statements, but ultimately remained above their daily lows.
The leading index
Dow Jones Industrial
contained its loss at the end of trading at 33,966 points to 0.42 percent.
The market-wide
S&P 500
ended up down 0.61 percent to 3995 points and the technology-
heavy Nasdaq 100 s
increased by 0.79 percent to 11,741 points.
At its December meeting, the Fed only raised the key interest rate by half a percentage point, as was largely expected, thereby slowing down the pace of rate hikes.
However, the monetary watchdogs apparently do not intend to end their fight against inflation any time soon.
For 2023, they signal even more interest rate hikes than before.
Monetary policy is likely to be eased in the years that follow.
However, a higher interest rate level is expected than the central bankers had previously promised.
Stock markets in Asia under pressure
The stock exchanges in Asia came under pressure on Thursday after new interest rate signals from the US Federal Reserve.
The monetary watchdogs are slowing down the pace of interest rate hikes, but are also signaling that the fight against excessive inflation will take quite a while.
The Nikkei index closed 0.4 percent lower.
Surprisingly weak economic data, such as industrial production and retail sales, also caused a gloomy mood in China.
The CSI-300 index, which lists the top 300 Chinese companies listed on the mainland stock exchanges, fell 0.2 percent and Hong Kong SAR's Hang Seng index fell 1.2 percent.
Bitcoin above 17,500
The world's best-known digital currency, Bitcoin, was last listed on the Bitstamp trading platform at 17,720 US dollars.
oil prices
Oil prices eased in early trade on Thursday.
In the morning, a barrel (159 liters) of North Sea Brent cost $82.13.
That was 57 cents less than the day before.
The price of a barrel of the American West Texas Intermediate (WTI) variety rose by 66 cents to $76.62.
With news agencies