European stock futures go up, but November retail sales in the UK are lower than expected.

Asian Trade TVDecember 16, 2022

0 133 2 minutes read

Before a bunch of important economic data comes out, it’s likely that European stock markets will open slightly higher on Friday. This will be a bounce-back from the previous session’s drop, which was caused by the ECB’s “hawkish” message.

At 02:00 ET (07:00 GMT), the DAX futures contract in Germany went up 0.3%, the CAC 40 futures contract in France went up 0.3%, and the FTSE 100 futures contract in the U.K. went up 0.5%.

On Thursday, the European Central Bank slowed down the rate at which it was raising interest rates by tightening them by 50 basis points. However, President Christine Lagarde made it clear that more significant tightening was still on the way to fight inflation.

Related: European food delivery improves with Getir’s Gorillas’ acquisition.

Lagarde said in a statement that went along with the decision, “The Governing Council judges that interest rates will still need to rise significantly and steadily to reach levels that are sufficiently restrictive to ensure a timely return of inflation to the 2% medium-term target.”

Because of this “hawkish” tone, the investment bank JPMorgan raised its prediction for how high interest rates will go in the Eurozone from 2.50% to 3.25%.

With this in mind, investors will carefully look at upcoming economic data, such as flash PMI data from the Eurozone and the U.K., to measure inflationary pressures and growth signals for signs of what the central bank might do next.

Retail sales in the U.K. fell 0.4% in November, which is 5.9% less than the same month last year. This is a disappointing number that shows how consumers are struggling to spend money on extras as prices rise.

Crude oil prices went down a little bit on Friday, continuing their decline from the day before. This was due to worries about how the economy will do in the future. However, prices were expected to go up a lot this week because of tightening supplies and the possibility that Chinese demand would rise.

Following the lead of the U.S. Federal Reserve, the ECB, the Bank of England, and the Swiss National Bank all raised interest rates on Thursday. They all said that more tightening was on the way. This, along with weak economic data, has made people more worried about a possible global recession, which will lead to less energy use.

By 02:00 ET, U.S. crude futures were down 0.2% to $75.95 a barrel, while the Brent contract was down 0.1% to $81.12.

Both benchmarks are likely to see weekly gains of over 6%, which would be their biggest weekly gains since early October. This is because the Keystone pipeline was shut down because of a leak, and full Chinese demand is likely to return in 2023 when COVID limits are lifted.