(News Bulletin 247) – Wall Street ended Friday’s session on a significant decline, having thus accumulated heavy losses over the whole of the past week, victim of releases following inflation figures much worse than expected .

At the close of the session, the Dow Jones fell 1% to 32,817 points, as did the S&P500 at 3,970 points, while the Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.7% to 11,395 points. Over the week, the three indices thus lost 3%, 2.7% and 3.3% respectively.

The Consumer Expenditure Deflator (PCE) – the Fed’s favored measure of inflation – came to contradict hopes that inflation had peaked.

Due to a rebound in gasoline prices, the core PCE index thus stood at 4.7% over one year in January, after 4.6% in December, while analysts were hoping for a slowdown.

‘These figures show that the process of disinflation, which began a few months ago, will be much more chaotic than initially thought’, reacted Christophe Boucher, director of investments at ABN Amro Investment Solutions.

‘They also question the possibility that the Fed could lower its rates later in the year, as was expected by the markets’, continued the professional.

Another element arguing for the continuation of monetary tightening, household consumption expenditure rebounded by 1.8% in January, a progression much higher than the consensus, and this despite an increase of only 0.6% in their income.

To make matters worse, the University of Michigan’s confidence index rose to 67 in February, against 64.9 in January, showing the good resistance of activity in the United States.

Finally, the Commerce Department announced a 7.2% increase in new home sales in January, after a similar increase the previous month.

In the news of the values, the operators have heavily sanctioned the quarterly results of the software publisher Autodesk (-13%) published the previous evening, but welcomed more favorably those of its peer Intuit (+ 1.9%).

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