Wall Street is otherwise little moved
Microsoft is temporarily more valuable than Apple
January 11, 2024, 11:01 p.m
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Wall Street has been looking forward to the new price data for days. They don’t provide any reason for euphoria; on balance, the US stock exchanges hardly budge. In addition to Bitcoin, what is particularly striking is the development of Microsoft papers.
Wall Street pared its initial gains following the release of US inflation data. The Dow Jones Index the standard values closed little changed on Thursday at 37,711 points. The technology-heavy one Nasdaq stagnated at 14,970 points. The broad one S&P 500 lost 0.1 percent to 4780 points.
Core inflation, which excludes volatile energy and food prices, fell to 3.9 percent in the US in December from 4.0 percent previously. Experts polled by Reuters had expected a decline to 3.8 percent. Investors fear that the figures will cause the US Federal Reserve to postpone the long-awaited easing of monetary policy. The monetary authorities are trying to curb high inflation with increased interest rates. “With these numbers, it’s hard to imagine the Fed at its meeting in January pointing to easing monetary policy at the next meeting in March,” said Michael Feroli, chief economist at JP Morgan. More than 65 percent of investors are currently hoping for a first interest rate cut in March. Falling interest rates following the Fed’s decision in May are more or less a foregone conclusion. Most analysts, on the other hand, do not expect any easing of monetary policy before the second half of the year.
At the Oil market Concerns about the situation in the Middle East drove prices up again. The North Sea Brent variety and US light oil WTI rose in price by around one and a half percent each to 77.85 and 72.48 dollars per barrel (159 liters). The reason was a message from the British naval authority UKMTO, according to which an oil tanker had been hijacked in the waters 50 nautical miles east of Oman.
Bitcoin ends up back at the previous day’s level
The Bitcoin broke the $49,000 mark after the first Bitcoin spot ETFs were approved in the USA. At $49,051.33, the most important cyber currency was temporarily more expensive than it has been since 2021. However, profit-taking shortly afterwards pushed them back to the previous day’s level of around $46,000. Investors also cashed in on Bitcoin providers. The titles of Coinbase, Bitfarms and Riot Platforms reduced their previous strong gains and lost between 6.7 and 15.8 percent.
Overtaken in other individual values Microsoft Apple was temporarily the most valuable listed company in the world. The success of the software company’s investments in the ChatGPT manufacturer OpenAI drove its stock market value by two percent to $2.903 trillion. Apple at the same time had a market capitalization of $2.871 trillion.
The shares of Boeing 2.3 percent gave up. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced a formal investigation into recent safety problems at Boeing. After the emergency landing of an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX last Friday due to a cabin wall that broke out during flight, the FAA grounded 171 aircraft of this type. Now the authority said it would examine whether the company had failed to comply with rules. The Alaska Airlines near-crash “should never have happened and must not happen again.”