Wall Street under pressure after the best week of the S&P 500, Nasdaq and Dow Jones indices since November 2020: in the period from Monday to last Friday, the S&P 500 jumped 6.1%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 5.5%, while the Nasdaq Composite flew 8.1%. At 15.30 Italian time, the Dow Jones moved back by 176 points (-0.51%), to 34,578 points; the S&P 500 drops 0.35% to 4,447 points, while the Nasdaq loses more than 1% to 13,738 points. Sales are raging especially on hi-tech securities, against US Treasury rates that have even exceeded the 2.2% threshold. Down between the Big Tech Microsoft and the Meta holding company of Facebook.
Special note in today’s session is Boeing: the stock listed on the Dow Jones sinks, after the announcement of the Chinese Aviation Authority, which announced that a Boeing 737 passenger plane of the airline China Eastern Airlines crashed to the ground with 132 people on board, including 123 passengers and nine crew members.
Contact with the plane was lost in the skies of Wuzhou in the Guangxi region. The plane, believed to be the MU5735, had left Kunming at 1.11pm local time and was expected to arrive in just under two hours, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24.
The site, reports Cnbc, shows that the plane began to lose altitude shortly after 14.20 local time.
New troubles for Boeing: the giant was forced to leave the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft on the ground in the period between March 2019 and December 2020 – in some countries for a longer period of time – after the discovery of defects of production that had caused two plane crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
In March 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed after another flight with the same Boeing, Lion Air airline, departing from Jakarta, crashed into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board. in October 2018.
The plane that crashed in China today is a non-MAX Boeing 737.
The Chinese aviation authorities approved the return to the skies of the Boeing 737 Max in December but so far no model has returned to be operational.
Focus on Wall Street also on the new oil blaze; WTI and Brent contracts shot up between 5% and over 6% respectively, topping $ 110 and $ 114 a barrel. The rumors that even the EU, like the US, could decide in favor of an embargo against Russian oil and gas weigh heavily.
Oil prices also discount the news of the attacks launched by Houthi rebels against Saudi Arabia, which hit a liquefied natural gas plant, a water desalination plant, an oil and electricity plant. The Yanbu Port City LNG plant is operated by Saudi Arabian Oil Co, better known as Saudi Aramco.
“After one of the best weeks of the last few years, the question now is: will stocks be able to maintain these gains? Somehow positive news is that April is historically one of the best months for stocks, hence the calendar. remains positive for the bulls, “LPL Financial’s Ryan Detrick told CNBC, looking at the Wall Street trend.
The problem is represented by the ubiquitous volatility on the markets since the beginning of the war in Ukraine triggered by the invasion of Russia on February 24th.
No concrete development in the ceasefire negotiations between Moscow and Kiev. Kiev remains surrounded by Russian forces, which bombed a shopping center in the Podilskyi district of the capital overnight. Moscow’s request for Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Mariupol to lay down their arms was promptly refused by the Ukrainian government.
From the corporate front, in addition to Boeing, look at the announcement of Berkshire Hathaway, the holding managed and founded by Warren Buffett, which has reached an agreement for the purchase of the Alleghany insurance company, for a value of $ 11.6 billion, or of $ 848.02 per share, in cash. The conglomerate specified that the agreement “represents a multiple of 1.26 times the book value of Alleghany as of December 31, 2021”. The price is also a premium of 16% compared to the average value that the stock has reported in the last 30 days. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year. Alleghany stock soars more than 25%.