The announcement of a new lockdown in Austria starting next week has caused the stock exchanges to skid. All European lists closed in red with Milan (FtseMib) down 1.20% while Frankfurt and Paris lost 0.30% and 0.40% respectively. The Dow Jones on Wall Street is also in red while the Nasdaq continues to rise. Operators fear that other countries may also follow the same route as Vienna. Today the German health minister said he could not rule out new closures in light of the new cases on the rise.
November marked a return of the coronavirus for several European countries. Recently in Germany the number of daily infections has exceeded the threshold of 50,000, with Merkel herself speaking in no uncertain terms about the “dramatic situation”. Even in Italy we are witnessing an increase in cases, although the numbers for the moment have a different order of magnitude. In the US, however, the trend is not so dissimilar, with contagions on the rise again.
Meanwhile, sales on consumer stocks returned to Milan. Penalized by the news Autogrill (-8%) as well as Ovs (-5%). Bank stocks are also in the red, with Unicredit down by over four percentage points and Intesa Sanpaolo by 3.2%, followed by Bper Banca (-2.7%) and Banco Bpm (-2.3%). The euro also suffers, with drops of almost half a percentage point against the dollar and falling to new lows.
Meanwhile, analysts begin to dwell on the new picture. “In trying to predict evolution, what has already happened in the United Kingdom and Israel can help us: in the first case, the wave in terms of numbers is comparable to what we observed last winter, but vaccines have decisively changed the framework: hospitalizations are 85% lower than the peak at the end of 2020 and the beds occupied by Covid patients, despite four months of data above 30,000 daily infections, are only 5% of the total. In Israel, where 40% of the population has had access to the third dose, after an autumn growth the cases are now numbered in the dozen. Furthermore, globally with the new year the first drugs will arrive which, if taken at the beginning of the infection, would be able to avoid the most serious consequences of the virus “writes Antonio Anniballe, manager of the Multi Asset Italia team of GAM ( Italy) SGR.
The expert says he does not expect disruptive effects on the economy, except for limited periods and without derailing the recovery in progress. “However, it is probable that some of the effects observed on our habits and therefore, more generally, on the economy, tend to be prolonged,” he says. Among these, one of the most prominent is represented by problems on the supply side: Covid “makes the world less efficient” from the point of view of production and logistics ». Thus some supply difficulties could continue, continuing to exert pressure on prices, although the economic slowdown in progress mitigates the problem to some extent.