A fairly placid US open helped ease the losses seen elsewhere, though disappoint with the day’s Chinese data prevented a whole-hearted pivot into the green.
The Dow Jones, which was at one point heading for a 125 point fall, instead started the session effectively flat at 26850.
This allowed the European indices to at minimum halve their losses, and in some cases go even further. The FTSE slipped half a percent, keeping it the wrong side of 6300, with the DAX and CAC dipping 0.3% and 0.4% respectively, roughly a third of how much they were down at lunchtime.
There wasn’t too much to report from the month’s ECB meeting. The central bank’s covid-19-battling bond-buying programme was kept unchanged after 4 months of scaling up, as Lagarde and co. try to assess the pace of the Eurozone’s ‘significant but uneven recovery.’
The main blight on Thursday’s trading was China’s latest data dump. Though, on the surface, it was something to celebrate, with the country posting a 3.2% expansion in Q2 against the 6.8% contraction in Q1, it wasn’t the kind of rebound investors were hoping for. That’s because Chinese consumers still seem reticent to splash the cash, with the most recent retail sales reading down 1.6% year-on-year.
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