The markets didn’t even both with the pretence of a calm start on Friday, bringing another rough week to a close with their latest triple digit decline.
At this point, it is hard to come up with something new to say about the situation. With no signs of the outbreak slowing down – the UK, for example, saw its first Covid-19 death on Thursday – investors remain gripped with a near unshakeable panic, the week’s various central bank rate cuts only serving to reinforce the seriousness of the situation.
The FTSE was slightly better than its Eurozone peers, falling 2.2%. That left the UK index at 6700, a couple of hundred points above July 2016-matching lows struck on Monday. The DAX found itself down 300 points and stuck under 11650, while the CAC plunged 150 points as it desperately tried to hold above 5200.
Turning to this afternoon and the Dow Jones is set to echo those losses, with the futures pointing to a 1.1% decline when the bell rings on Wall Street. That would take the US index back under 25850 – roughly halfway between Monday’s 25,000 lows and Wednesday’s 27,000 highs.
Between now and then, of course, is the nonfarm jobs report – though one imagines there would need to be some miraculous figures to catch investors’ attention. The unemployment rate is expected unchanged at 3.6%, with a rise in wage growth from 0.2% to 0.3% – though that has been forecast for the last 5 months without materialising – potentially countered by a drop in the headline nonfarm figure from 225k to 175k.
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