(New York) The New York Stock Exchange finished close to balance on Thursday, ignoring the rebound in inflation recorded in December in the United States, on the eve of the start of the corporate results season.
The Dow Jones dipped 0.04%, the NASDAQ ended flat and the S
The event of the day was the publication of the CPI consumer price index, which came out at 0.3% over one month in December. This rebound surprised economists, who predicted 0.2%.
Over one year, inflation reached 3.4%, compared to 3.1% in November.
These higher-than-expected figures “will call into question the most daring assumptions about rate cuts this year,” said Michael Pearce of Oxford Economics in a note.
However, “this does not change our vision of inflation heading towards 2%” annually, the objective of the American central bank (Fed), even if the journey could be “rocky”, added the economist, who announces a first cut in the Fed’s key rate in May.
The bond market also seemed to ignore this surge in inflation.
The yield on 2-year US government bonds, the most representative of Wall Street’s monetary policy expectations, eased sharply to 4.25% from 4.35%.
According to Steve Sosnick, of Interactive Brokers, this decline in bond rates is also due to a debt issue from the US Treasury, which placed 21 billion on Thursday under satisfactory conditions.
On the stock side, “the market has done its best to ignore the numbers” on inflation, according to Steve Sosnick.
The session marked the debut of a new bitcoin investment fund, called ETF, whose listing was approved on Wednesday, after the stock market, by the American market regulator (SEC).
This product offers the possibility to all investors to gain exposure to digital currencies while keeping their funds in dollars and being able to withdraw them at any time, without going through cryptocurrency exchange platforms.
It is widely considered a major turning point for the wider adoption of digital currencies.
The 11 variations of this ETF launched on Thursday experienced varying fortunes, that of the world’s leading asset manager BlackRock, called iShares Bitcoin Trust, notably fell by 4.69%.
The green light for these new products had been impatiently awaited for several weeks and had supported bitcoin itself, but also most of the sector’s stocks listed on the stock exchange.
The first day of trading of these ETFs was the occasion for profit taking, which weighed down the exchange platform Coinbase (-6.70%) or the “miners” (creators of cryptocurrencies) Marathon Digital Holdings (-12 .60%) and Riot Platforms (-15.82%).
Still in the technology department, Microsoft was one of the few stocks to stand out (0.49%).
The creator of the Windows operating system even became, for a few seconds, the world’s largest capitalization, ahead of Apple (-0.32%), before falling back.
Elsewhere on the stock market, Chesapeake Energy Corporation (3.16%) was sought after the announcement of its upcoming merger with its competitor Southwestern Energy (-2.47%), which will unite two of the ten largest natural gas producers in the USA.
Citigroup suffered (-1.77%) after revealing that its fourth quarter results would be weighed down by $3.3 billion in exceptional charges and $1.3 billion in provisions.
The American rental company Hertz reversed course (-4.28%) after announcing the sale of a third of its fleet of electric vehicles, due to lack of sufficient demand, and an estimate of quarterly turnover lower than analysts’ expectations .
Netflix climbed (2.91%) after advertising manager Amy Reinhard told the specialist magazine Variety that the platform now had more than 23 million subscribers to its advertising offering.
