(News Bulletin 247) – The Paris Stock Exchange should open on a stable note on Wednesday morning, investors preparing to digest a new burst of economic indicators after the unsurprising US inflation figures published the day before.

Around 8:15 a.m., the futures contract on the CAC 40 index – delivery at the end of February – fell by a small point to 7217 points, announcing an unchanged start to the session, or almost.

Yesterday, market participants had received without much emotion the statistics of consumer prices in the United States, which show that US inflation is falling only very slowly.

The stock markets nevertheless suffered the blow following the publication of these figures, which suggest that the Federal Reserve will remain on its path of monetary tightening.

After gaining up to 0.8% in the middle of the afternoon, the Parisian market saw its gains melt away in the last minutes of trading, ending the session with an anecdotal gain of 0.1% to 7213 points.

Same trend on the side of New York, where the Dow Jones ended the day on Tuesday on a decline of less than 0.5%, while the Nasdaq Composite still managed to nibble 0.6% at the final bell.

Investors, who seemed less and less attentive to the very strong speech given by the members of the Fed in recent weeks, now seem to have some doubts about the scenario of a rapid ‘pivot’ from the central bank.

In the wake of the latest indicators, the consensus regarding the Fed’s ‘final rate’ is now mostly expected at 5.50% and the 5.25% is no longer as consensual as it was two weeks ago.

With this in mind, the spotlight will remain on the publication of the many statistics on the daily menu.

On the agenda of indicators, include retail sales in the United States, which should have rebounded in January after two months of decline, under the effect of sales of cars and service stations.

‘With a job market still robust and abundant savings, it may be premature to bury the American consumer’, warn economists at Oddo BHF.

Published this morning, UK inflation came in at an annual rate of 8.8% in January, marking a marked slowdown from 9.2% in December.

Investors are also awaiting a new avalanche of quarterly results, with the publications, among others, of some European heavyweights of the caliber of Ahold Delhaize, Kering or Heineken.

From a technical point of view, it is therefore a scenario of temporization, even of modest consolidation, which is taking shape for the moment on the Paris Stock Exchange.

“After a slight slide towards the support threshold of 7105 points at the end of last week, the Parisian index did not wait long to erase its decline and return to the resistance zone between 7200 and 7250 points”, recall the chartists of Kiplink Finance.

‘This rebound should be enough to reconnect with the annual high of 7320 but not enough to hope for more in the immediate future’, judges the brokerage firm.

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