(News Bulletin 247) – The Paris index ended the day up on Monday, during a relatively calm session. Investors are awaiting several meetings related to the Fed’s policy.

The CAC 40 returned to 7,500 points on Monday, the threshold it had left on August 1. The index closed up 0.7% at 7,502.01 points, at the end of a quiet session.

The Paris market continued its good momentum from last week, during which it recovered by almost 2.5%, reassured by several encouraging economic indicators in the United States.

“The US consumer price index (CPI) was weak enough to confirm the disinflation thesis, while the retail sales data helped to consolidate the hypothesis of a soft landing” for the US economy, summarizes Deutsche Bank.

This week will be marked mainly by monetary policy, and more particularly that of the American Federal Reserve (Fed). On Wednesday, the minutes of the last meeting of the American central bank will be published.

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Luxury in the right direction

On Friday, its chairman, Jerome Powell, will deliver a highly anticipated speech at the Jackson Hole symposium in Wyoming. Investors will be looking for clues about the Fed’s future decisions. Currently, the market is pricing in 100 basis points (1 percentage point) of interest rate cuts from the central bank by the end of December.

“We note that Fed chairs tend to keep a low profile in Jackson Hole. The easiest thing for Chairman Powell would be to repeat his message from July,” Bank of America nevertheless warns.

On the value side, luxury groups Kering (+2.6%) and LVMH (+2.5%) pulled the CAC 40. Arcelormittal advanced by 2.4% supported by an upgrade of recommendations from Barclays to “overweight” against “in line weighting” previously.

Thales suffered the biggest decline in the CAC 40 (-0.8%) while European defence groups suffered from press reports raising doubts about German military aid to Ukraine.

For its part, Nexans fell by 2.3% while Goldman Sachs went from buy to “neutral” on the stock.

On other markets, the euro continued its strong rise against the dollar, gaining 0.3% to $1.1064. Oil lost ground. The October contract on North Sea Brent fell 0.3% to $79.41 per barrel, while the September contract on WTI listed in New York fell 0.3% to $76.46 per barrel.