The European markets surprisingly kept their cool on Friday morning, despite Donald Trump effectively banning TikTok and WeChat in the United States.
Giving companies 45 days to end all transactions with ByteDance and Tencent – the respective owners of the China-based apps – the President lobbed another tech grenade in his cold war with Beijing, almost guaranteeing some kind of retaliation from the rival superpower.
But with the form and severity of that retaliation currently unknown, the markets managed to avoid a full-blown panic attack, instead taking a more leisurely dip into the red.
The FTSE was the best performing index, at points squeezing out a 0.1% increase. The DAX slipped 0.1%, while the CAC was down 0.2%.
As for the Dow Jones, that’s heading for an 80 point drop when trading begins stateside – though, expect that to change dependent on Friday’s nonfarm jobs report.
Analysts are expecting 1.55 million jobs to have been created in July, a huge reversal from June’s 4.8 million, as various states re-entered a stricter form of lockdown. It is also worth pointing out that pre-release estimates have been way off since the pandemic hit the West, so the actual number could look very different.
Elsewhere the unemployment rate is set to fall from 11.1% to 10.5% – not bad considering it was expected to hit 19.4% in May – with wage growth also improving month-on-month, from -1.2% to -0.5%.
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