Economic indicators

-Economic indicators from this week highlight how strong inflation has spiked in recent months.

-New home sales in the U.S. fell 16.6% month-on-month in April, the largest decline in nine years.

-Eurozone growth remains robust on a stronger service sector while manufacturing sectors show little expansion.

-UK private sector growth fell to one-year lows as business activity slowdown in May due to inflation.

-UK’s flash services PMI fell 51.8 from 58.9 previous while the flash manufacturing fell 54.6 from 55.8 previous.

Equities

-Wall Street saw its longest streak of weekly declines since the dot-com bubble (20 years ago).

-Aggressive plans to curb 40-year high inflation dampen investor risk appetite, taking most major indices to the red territory.  

-Recession seems to be a repeated word in this week’s market theme, causing investors to worry and resort to safe havens with more liquidity heading to gold prices.

-Communication services and consumer discretionary suffered the biggest percentage losses.

-Social media stocks lose more than $135B in market value.

FX

-Lagarde’s comments lifted the Euro comments on hiking rates by the 3rd quarter lifted the common currency.

-The USD continued to drag after reaching its 2-decade peak near 105 which it hit earlier to correct back to levels of 102.32.

-The Kiwi gained after the Reserve bank of New Zealand hikes interest rates from 1.5% to 2.0%.

Banks

-JPMorgan cut its forecast for China’s second-quarter GDP to a fall of 5.4% from a prior forecast of a 1.5% decline.

-Financials and Interest rate-sensitive banks have been the biggest gainers this week ahead of the FOMC minutes.