(CercleFinance.com) – Mission accomplished, Wall Street completes an 8th consecutive week of increase which marks one of the longest Christmas ‘rallies’ in history and of the 21st century.
We couldn’t have hoped for a better scenario on the eve of the long Christmas weekend: it was almost surprising to see the Dow Jones drop 0.05% to 37,386 points after having spent most of the session between 37,400 and 37,500.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 gained 0.17% to 4,754 (+0.75% weekly) and the Nasdaq Composite gained 0.19% to 14,992 (+1.25% weekly) after hanging at 15,000 during most of the day
T-Bonds (+0.5Pts to 3.8900%) seem to have remained deaf to the good ‘PCE’ inflation figures in the United States.
This is the Federal Reserve’s favorite indicator for assessing the trajectory of prices: it moderated to 2.6% at an annual rate in November, down 0.3 points compared to the month of October, and in data ‘core (excluding food and energy products) contracted from 3.4% to 3.2% from one month to the next, according to the Department of Commerce.
Published at the same time, household consumption expenditure increased by 0.2% last month compared to October in the United States, for incomes up 0.4% from one month to the next.
After a decline of 5.1% in October, orders for durable goods increased by 5.4% in the United States in November (+2.2% anticipated), according to statistics published this Friday by the Department of Commerce.
The increase is mainly driven by the transport sector (aeronautical orders) but excluding transport, the increase in new orders for durable goods would be limited to 0.5%.
And to finish in style on the eve of Christmas, American consumer confidence improved even more pronouncedly than expected in December, to 69.7 compared to 69.4 initially according to the final index from the University of Michigan published Friday.
Joanne Hsu, the author of the report, continues to attribute this improvement to the improvement in inflation expectations over a one-year horizon, now back at 3.1%, the lowest since March 2021, instead of by 4.5% last month.
The only downside of the day concerns sales of new individual homes which plunged 12.2% in November compared to the previous month, to stand at 590,000 units at an annualized rate, according to the Department of Commerce, after a fall of 4 % in October.
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