The new stock market week opens with a positive tone for Piazza Affari. The Ftse Mib index closed with + 0.81% at 21,382 points. Among the titles in the dust some banks stand out (+ 3.15% Banco BPM, + 2.59% Bper, + 1.98% Unicredit and + 1.69% Intesa) with the expectation in the coming days of the quarterly results of the main big banking. The first to test accounts will be Unicredit cda tomorrow and circulation accounts the next day).
On the other hand, TIM’s weakness is confirmed (-2.69% to 0.21 euros) which at the start of the day slipped to new historical intraday lows of 0.2074 euros. The fall of the Draghi government has put pressure on the Italian telecommunications system with the market fearing a new abrupt halt to the single network project.
Piazza Affari is back from a week up (+ 1.33%) even if with a clear underperformance compared to the other main world stock exchanges (Nikkei + 4% Nasdaq 3.3%, Dax + 3% in the last 5 sessions) thanks to the government crisis that resulted in Draghi’s resignation and early elections. Today we report the widening of the Italy-Greece spread with the Italian ten-year BTP which has reached 31 bps more than the Greek ten-year counterpart.
This week the spotlight is on the Fed which is expected to announce a new rate hike of 75 basis points on Wednesday evening. A hawkish surprise – a jumbo 100bp hike – now looks less likely after several members have made statements over the past two weeks. We think the Fed will raise rates and cause severe damage to growth before it reverses direction – BlackRock experts assert that it expects greater volatility until central banks take the stark trade-off between growth and inflation they are facing. “Central banks think they can curb inflation and cause only a slight slowdown, which is actually unlikely,” BlackRock explains in his weekly market commentary.