With 48 hours to go before the end of the 1st half of the year, buyers are back in the driver's seat, after Wall Street clearly set the tone on Tuesday evening (a small 0.4% pullback by the Dow Jones made no difference, as the S&P500 remained unchanged).
The Paris Bourse gained +1% to 7,288 points, driven in particular by Carrefour (+3.5%), followed by the "technos", with CapGemini, Eurofins and ST-Micro all shooting up +2.6%.

The Paris index followed in Wall Street's footsteps, buoyed on Tuesday by a number of statistics confirming the unexpected resilience of the US economy.

The announcement of a jump in new home sales, followed by a sharp rise in the consumer confidence index, largely underpinned the trend on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

Optimism about the possibility of avoiding a recession should support the stock markets, as investors start to believe again in the possibility of a painless landing for the economy.

Without a U.S. recession, a global recession is unlikely", say the teams at Evli, a Scandinavian asset management company.

A view shared by Carmignac's strategists.

As long as the economy slows down without collapsing, and the pace of disinflation is maintained, keeping long-term interest rates in check, equity markets should remain on a crest line", says Kevin Thozet, one of the Paris-based investment fund's strategists.

But if global growth continues to show strength in the short term, this also means that central banks will have to continue tightening policy in the months ahead.

For the ECB President, inflation remains too high in Europe, and the institution will have to continue its fight against rising prices 'whatever the cost'.
All is not rosy in Europe, despite the strength shown by the indices (E-Stoxx50, DAX and CAC at +1%): German household morale deteriorated as the month of July approached, in a climate of heightened uncertainty regarding the country's economic outlook.

The index compiled by the Nuremberg-based GfK institute, calculated from a sample of 2,000 people over the first part of the month just ended, sank to -25.4 points, compared with a revised figure of -24.4 in June.

This indicator shows that household confidence has been affected by the greater difficulty expressed by households in saving, primarily in the face of persistent inflationary pressures.

The sub-index measuring their income prospects thus fell by 2.4 points to -10.6, as consumers once again feel that part of their real wages will be absorbed by high inflation.

Bond markets are easing in the Eurozone: OATs and Bunds are down 3pts each at 2.864% and 2.335% respectively, while Italian BTPs are down only -1.5pts at 3.995%.
US T-Bonds are down 1.5pts at 3.764%, with no real market mover.

Last 'figure of the day': crude oil inventories reached 453.7 million barrels in the week to June 19 in the United States, signalling a 9.6 million-barrel drop in stocks compared with the previous week, according to the EIA (US Energy Information Agency).

Inventories of distillates - including heating oil - rose by anecdotal amounts (+0.1 million barrels), as did gasoline stocks (+0.6 million barrels), again compared with the previous week.

Finally, the EIA reports that refineries operated at 92.2% of their operating capacity during the same week, with average production of 10.1 million barrels/day.
This boosted the price of Brent crude oil, which recovered +1.5% in a few minutes from $71.8 to $73 in London.

In French company news, Orpea reported that it had applied to Euronext Paris and the Luxembourg Stock Exchange to suspend the listing of all its financial instruments, pending the outcome of votes by the classes of affected parties on its accelerated safeguard plan.

TotalEnergies announced on Wednesday that it plans to invest 70 million euros in 2024 in its biorefinery at La Mède (Bouches-du-Rhône), with the aim of being able to process up to 100% waste from the circular economy to produce biofuels.

SES Space & Defense announces that its subsidiary DRS Global Enterprise Solutions (GES) has been awarded a five-year X-band blanket purchase contract, worth an estimated $134 million, from the US Department of Defense.

Finally, Thales announced on Wednesday that it has entered into a new partnership with Google Cloud to develop data protection functionalities based on generative artificial intelligence.

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