PARIS (Reuters) – The main European stock markets are up slightly on Monday morning in a calm session with many markets closed around the world while the week will be marked in Europe by the public holidays of May 8 and 9.

The improvement is supported by the easing in the bond compartment in the wake of Friday’s publication of American employment figures which plead, in the eyes of investors, for a first relaxation of interest rates from the Fed this year.

In Paris, the CAC 40 rose 0.16% to 7,970.31 points around 07:30 GMT. In Frankfurt, the Dax gains 0.25%. In London, the FTSE 100 is closed for the Early May Bank Holiday.

The EuroStoxx 50 index increased by 0.11% and the FTSEurofirst 300 by 0.18%. The Stoxx 600 gained 0.20%, driven mainly by the energy sector (+0.51%) while Saudi Arabia increased its crude prices for the month of June and a cease-fire agreement was reached. -fire in the Gaza Strip appears thin.

Futures contracts on Wall Street predict an increase of 0.14% for the Dow Jones, 0.16% for the Standard & Poor’s 500 and 0.13% for the Nasdaq.

Trading volumes are reduced as the Tokyo Stock Exchange remained closed on Monday and many investors in Europe are on vacation due to the anniversary of the armistice of May 8, 1945 on Wednesday, and on Thursday of the Christian feast of the Ascension, although financial markets will remain open during this period.

In the euro zone, operators will monitor for today’s session the final activity figures for the month of April which should confirm the rebound in the composite PMI index announced in the first estimate, a sign of a restart in the community bloc able to ward off fears of a recession.

At the same time, the producer price index in the euro zone, forecast at 09:00 GMT, should reinforce the decline in inflationary pressures.

Philip Lane, the European Central Bank’s (ECB) chief economist, told Spanish newspaper El Confidencial that the case for cutting interest rates in June was growing stronger as services inflation finally began. to attenuate.

On the bond market, the yield on the ten-year German Bund lost around one basis point, to 2.499% after a decline of 4.6 points on Friday, while its American equivalent appeared stable at 4.4975%, after a decline of 6.9 points on Friday.

In terms of values, in Paris, Atos is volatile, the stock now losing 1.24% after jumping almost 10% at the start of trading. The IT group announced Monday that it had received four financial restructuring proposals.

Maurel et Prom climbs 6.90% after receiving an OFAC license from the US Department of the Treasury for its operations in Venezuela.

Elsewhere in Europe, the Dutch postal group PostNL lost 4.27% after reporting a loss for the first quarter on Monday, while the Swedish real estate group SBB is in the red (-0.37%) after a new quarterly loss before taxes.

(Writing by Claude Chendjou, edited by Kate Entringer)

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