First part of session heavy pearls European stock markets following the strong drops suffered by Asian stock exchanges in the morning and by Wall Street yesterday. Milan dropped 1.7%, Paris and London 1.5% and Frankfurt 1.4% while futures on Wall Street fell slightly.
The stock markets are discounting fears about the war in the Middle East, which aggravates an already deteriorated geopolitical picture, the chiaroscuro macro data on the Chinese economy, where retail sales and industrial production have disappointed, and fears about further postponements of the rate cut in the USA after yesterday's brilliant data on retail sales in March.
The crisis between Iran and Israel supports oil, with a modest increase (+0.3%), with Brent at 90.3 dollars and the WTI at 85.6 dollars, but also pushes gas, with TTF futures advancing by 3, 2%, to 32.1 euros per megawatt hour. Gold also rises, to 2,371 dollars an ounce. Bonds, however, showed little change, with the yield on the Italian ten-year bond essentially stable at 3.87% and the spread with the Bund opening by one basis point, at 144.
Stellantis slipped on Piazza Affari (-2.9%), Popolare diSondrio (-2.6%), Finecobank (-2.4%), Tenaris (-2.4%), Fineco (-2.3%) and Intesa (-2.2%).