May 09, 2022 02:02AM ET
By: AnalysisWatch
European stock markets are expected to open weaker on Monday as investors continue to worry about slowing global growth while central banks tighten monetary policy to fight rising inflation.
At 10:05 PM ET, the DAX futures contract in Germany was trading 0.6% lower, the CAC 40 futures contract in France was down 1% and the FTSE 100 futures contract in the United Kingdom was down 0.7%.
European equities fell last week, with the DAX, CAC 40 and FTSE 100 down around 2%, driven by a slump on Wall Street after the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 50 basis points and promised further increases of a similar magnitude in the coming months.
The Bank of England also raised rates for the fourth month in a row and European Central Bank policymakers are now talking more openly about rate hikes that could start in July.
The ECB is expected to raise rates up to three times this year as part of its fight against inflation, Robert Holzmann, the Austrian central bank's famously hawkish governor, said in a newspaper interview over the weekend.
This week, Germany's ZEW sentiment index and preliminary first-quarter GDP data in the UK will be released, which should point to slowing growth in Europe's two largest economies.
Data released on Monday from China showed that the country's export growth slowed to single digits in April. Year-on-year growth was 3.9% in April, down from 14.7% in March. It was the slowest growth since June 2020.
Fearing that President Putin will allow the conflict in Ukraine to escalate, Russia is preparing for Monday's anniversary celebrations of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.
In corporate news, the spotlight will be on the results of BioNTech, which is expected to benefit from the sale of its COVID vaccine, developed with US giant Pfizer.
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