European stock prices drop when global risks are brought up. The Flash Eurozone PMI also drops.
The website Investing.com offers European stock markets were down after the first few hours of trading on Tuesday. This was because China and the U.S. reminded investors of the risks to global growth that they pose.
Snap (NYSE: SNAP), the company that owns Snapchat, had disappointing earnings numbers, and the Chinese government’s stimulus plan, which was announced on Monday, was not as big as people had hoped. This made people less willing to take risks, and markets all over the continent fell.
At 8:20 a.m. ET (4:20 a.m. GMT), the STOXX 600 index had dropped 2.9 points, or 0.7%, to 432.74 points. The German DAX fell by 1%, while the French CAC 40 fell by 1.3%, and the British FTSE 100 fell by 0.8%.
France’s poor performance began in May when Insee’s business confidence index fell more than expected. It got worse when its flash purchasing managers’ indices for manufacturing and services also fell more than expected.
On the other hand, Germany’s composite PMI went up for the first time since the war in Ukraine began, from 54.0 to 54.6, even though most people thought it would go down to 54.0. Even so, S&P Global thought that activity in the Eurozone as a whole had probably slowed down this month. The region’s flash composite PMI dropped from 55.8 in March to 54.9 in April.
Even though many people are worried about a slowdown in growth because of high energy prices and supply chain problems made worse by China’s Zero COVID policy, these numbers still show that the economy is clearly growing. This policy was the main reason why China’s latest fiscal stimulus package was looked at in a bad light the next day. When the Chinese government announced a set of measures, including big corporate tax rebates, the markets were excited at first. However, the excitement quickly faded as people realized that the stimulus won’t do much good if the government is also trying to stop people from moving and buying.
Since ECB President Christine Lagarde said on Monday that the bank would raise its deposit rate to at least zero percent (from -0.5 percent now) by the end of September, the possibility of higher interest rates is also getting bigger for European stocks. In an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday, Lagarde also said that a 50 basis point hike could happen as early as July, though most analysts still think that’s unlikely.
Publicis (EPA:PUBP) was one of the companies that moved on its own, and it lost 2% after Snap gave a bad update late on Monday. Advertising groups didn’t find much comfort in the outlook of the social media company. The news also hurt tech and growth stocks more than they should have. For example, online fashion retailer Zalando (ETR:ZALG) and meal delivery service HelloFresh (ETR:HFGG) both dropped around 5% and were among the worst DAX performers. In Amsterdam, sales of Just Eat Takeaway (AS:TKWY) went down by 5.6%.
In the U.K., Barclays (LON:BARC) stock went against the trend and went up 2.3% after the company said it would go ahead with its planned buyback. This is because the embarrassing problem of issuing too much debt in the form of structured notes has been fixed.
