Europe’s STOXX 600 index closed higher on Friday in a broad-based rally led by retailers and automakers, while investors awaited minutes from the European Central Bank’s last policy meeting and kept an eye out for a slew of data due next week.
The pan-European benchmark index jumped 1.16 percent to 433.33 to log its best one-day performance in more than a week.
The index rose 0.25 from a week earlier, and has gained 5.1 percent so far this month, putting it on track for its second straight month of gains, driven by several factors including better-than-expected earnings, despite lingering worries of a recession in the eurozone.
Data this week showed that inflation hovered at a record high last month.
S&P Global’s eurozone flash composite Purchasing Managers’ Index survey scheduled to be released on Wednesday is expected to show activity falling further from last month.
“The underlying momentum seems quite better than the macro might suggest it should be, which is quite encouraging,” Peel Hunt economist and strategist Ian Williams said.
The STOXX 600 index is down more than 11 percent this year as investors feared aggressive interest rate hikes by the European Central Bank (ECB) could deepen a recession in the eurozone already reeling with an energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Three top policymakers on Friday said that the ECB must raise interest rates high enough to dampen growth as it fights sky-high inflation, and that it could soon start running down its 5 trillion euro (US$5.2 trillion) debt pile, even as some hint at slower rate hikes.
“It’s a very difficult balancing act, because inflation has surprised consistently to the upside and they have all got it wrong,” Williams said.
Minutes of the ECB’s policy meeting last month are due on Thursday
Automakers and retailers were the top gainers, up more than 2.1 percent each.
The UK’s blue-chip index FTSE 100 closed the session 0.53 percent higher at 7,385.52, while marking a weekly gain of nearly 0.92 percent, as gains in insurer Legal & General and broad optimism in European markets outweighed declines in energy stocks.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
NATURAL PARTNERS: Taiwan and Japan have complementary dominant supply chain positions, are geographically and culturally close, and have similar work ethics Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and other related companies would add ￥11.2 trillion (US$78.31 billion) to Japan’s chipmaking hot spot Kumamoto Prefecture over the next decade, a local bank’s analysis said. Kyushu Financial Group, a lender based in Kumamoto’s capital, almost doubled its projection for the economic impact that the chip sector would bring to the region compared to its estimate a year earlier, a presentation on Thursday said. The bank said that 171 firms had made new investments since November 2021, up from 90 in an earlier analysis. TSMC’s Kumamoto location was once a sleepy farming area, but has undergone
RSS