Though the losses weren’t severe, the European markets turned into the red on Thursday following Wednesday’s enlightening Fed meeting.
With inflation in the US ever on the rise, the Federal Reserve switched things up on yesterday evening, signalling it now expects 2 interest rate rises in 2023 – a year earlier than forecast.
Jerome Powell also noted that the central bank had been ‘talking-about-talking-about’ tapering its current $120 billion a month asset buying programme, though the heavily caveated nature of that statement likely helped soften the blow of its implications.
The Dow Jones got off relatively lightly in the aftermath, falling just shy of 0.8%. Considering its bloated girth, however, that did still translate to a 265-point decline.
It also leaves the Dow set to fall below 34,000 this afternoon, with its prospective 0.4%, or 140-point, drop about to push to a near-1-month low of 33,890.
This as the dollar took lumps out of the pound, where it was up 0.2% and at a 6-week peak, and the euro, where a 0.6% increase sent the greenback to a 2-month high.
Those currency struggles put a limit on the losses of the European indices. The FTSE dropped 0.4%, reversing course away from 7,200 to hit 7,160, while the nastiness of the euro’s decline meant the DAX got away with a 0.1% dip.
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