European stocks failed to stage a recovery on Friday, posting their worst week since a market correction last February as a new sell-off hit bourses across the globe, amid worries about protectionism and fast-rising US interest rates.
Euro zone stocks initially jumped one percent, but rapidly shed all of their gains despite Wall Street opening higher.
All major bourses closed in negative territory and the STOXX 600 benchmark fell 0.3 percent to 358.95 recording a weekly loss of 4.6 percent.
That is just below the 5.1 percent fallback experienced last February when a sudden scare about rising inflation and interest rates caused a global market correction.
UK shares fared similarly, with the FTSE 100 closing down 0.16 percent at 6,995.91 points, posting a weekly loss of 4.4 percent.
OUTPERFORMED
There is “a rotten trend” in Europe, a trader complained, saying that US shares have outperformed their European peers since the beginning of the year with fiscal cuts by US President Donald Trump’s administration boosting earnings.
Europe lags far behind the US in terms of earnings growth, and stronger results will be critical in luring back some of the billions that have been pulled out of European stocks this year.
Third-quarter results are beginning to trickle in from European firms as Wall Street banks formally kicked off the earnings season.
Tech stocks — the worst hit by this week’s sudden drop — made a modest comeback, up 0.5 percent, along with the growth-sensitive auto sector.
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
RESPONSE: The Japanese Ministry of Finance might have to intervene in the currency markets should the yen keep weakening toward the 160 level against the US dollar Japan’s chief currency official yesterday sent a warning on recent foreign exchange moves, after the yen weakened against the US dollar following Friday last week’s Bank of Japan (BOJ) decision. “We’re seeing one-directional, sudden moves especially after last week’s monetary policy meeting, so I’m deeply concerned,” Japanese Vice Finance Minister for International Affairs Atsushi Mimura told reporters. “We’d like to take appropriate responses against excessive moves.” The central bank on Friday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 30 years, but Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda chose to keep his options open rather than bolster the yen,
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
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