With little attention paid to the Bank of England, despite Mark Carney’s warning that investors are underestimating future interest rate hikes, the FTSE continued to lurk just above yesterday’s one month low.
Though Brent Crude’s 2.4% slide – coming after US crude stockpiles rose to their highest levels since September 2017 – failed to shake Shell (LON:RDSa), thanks to its better than forecasts Q1 profit, BP (LON:BP) slipped 0.6% to fall under £2.50. The FTSE’s miners were all down just shy of 2%, while Lloyds (LON:LLOY) sank 1.8% as it missed revenue and profit expectations.
The UK index, however, managed to cap its losses at 0.2%, in part thanks to cable pulling back from its 2-week highs. For whatever reason, the pound wasn’t very taken with the Bank of England revising higher its UK growth forecasts for the year.
The Dow Jones was unable to recover the ground lost in the aftermath of the Federal Reserve’s rate cut-dismissing statement on Wednesday evening. Instead the index dipped another 0.1%, tumbling under 26400 to sit at its worst price in almost 3-weeks. Tomorrow’s non-farm jobs report could be informative, as the Fed suggested that strong labour market conditions in the USA should eventually drag the country’s limp inflation higher.
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