European shares were little changed on Friday, while France’s stock market dropped in the final trading session before the nation’s presidential election today.
The STOXX Europe 600 closed little changed at 378.12 in London. France’s CAC 40 Index fell 0.4 percent, trimming an earlier drop of as much as 1 percent.
The European regional benchmark saw a weekly drop of 0.6 percent, its steepest since late January.
The latest Opinionway poll showed support for independent candidate Emmanuel Macron and far-right contestant Marine Le Pen was stable at 23 percent and 22 percent respectively.
French voters go to the polls in a first-round vote, with Macron and Le Pen the frontrunners to advance to the final election next month.
The murder of a policeman on the Champs-Elysees has forced an early end to campaigning for the leading candidates, with the race wide open, according to polls.
“The possibility of a hard-right Marine Le Pen presidency has worried markets for some time, but another risk scenario to consider is the victory of far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon,” Roubini Global Economics senior economist Lars Lundqvist said. “If either Le Pen or Melenchon make it to the second round, markets would stay on their toes a bit longer.”
Danone SA dropped as much as 2.9 percent after reporting the third consecutive quarterly drop in volume and including its US$10 billion takeover of WhiteWave Foods Co in its organic growth for the year.
European equities are still priced for a slight valuation premium linked to acceleration in global growth momentum and are not reflecting an “obvious political risk discount,” Deutsche Bank AG strategists, including Sebastian Raedler, wrote in a note.
Investors in European lenders are getting cold feet. Bets for swings in lenders’ stocks have jumped and options reached their highest prices since February last year relative to those for euro-area blue chips.
Taiwan’s rapidly aging population is fueling a sharp increase in homes occupied solely by elderly people, a trend that is reshaping the nation’s housing market and social fabric, real-estate brokers said yesterday. About 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident, the Ministry of the Interior said. The figures have nearly doubled from a decade earlier, Great Home Realty Co (大家房屋) said, as people aged 65 and older now make up 20.8 percent of the population. “The so-called silver tsunami represents more than just a demographic shift — it could fundamentally redefine the
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
Businesses across the global semiconductor supply chain are bracing themselves for disruptions from an escalating trade war, after China imposed curbs on rare earth mineral exports and the US responded with additional tariffs and restrictions on software sales to the Asian nation. China’s restrictions, the most targeted move yet to limit supplies of rare earth materials, represent the first major attempt by Beijing to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over foreign companies to target the semiconductor industry, threatening to stall the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. They prompted US President Donald Trump on Friday to announce that he would impose an additional
China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) said it expects peak season effects in the fourth quarter to continue to boost demand for passenger flights and cargo services, after reporting its second-highest-ever September sales on Monday. The carrier said it posted NT$15.88 billion (US$517 million) in consolidated sales last month, trailing only September last year’s NT$16.01 billion. Last month, CAL generated NT$8.77 billion from its passenger flights and NT$5.37 billion from cargo services, it said. In the first nine months of this year, the carrier posted NT$154.93 billion in cumulative sales, up 2.62 percent from a year earlier, marking the second-highest level for the January-September
RSS