(CercleFinance.com) – The US equity markets accentuated their decline on Friday, penalized by a worrying PMI index published at the very start of the session. The Dow Jones fell more than 0.8% to 32,920 points, while the Nasdaq Composite fell nearly 1% to 10,705 points.
With three consecutive sessions of decline, the first of these two flagship American indices showed a total of 1.7% losses over the whole of the past week, while the second dropped 2.7% in weekly balance sheet.
Markets were chilled by an accelerating contraction in the US private sector, given a composite PMI flash estimate of 44.6 for December, reigniting fears of recession after restrictive statements by the Fed.
‘San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said recent inflation news was a sign of hope, but she was still a long way from the central bank’s 2% target’, noted Wells Fargo.
As a reminder, market sentiment had deteriorated sharply on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve’s 50 basis point hike, but above all in the wake of comments by its chairman, Jerome Powell, which dampened hopes of an easing of rate next year.
On the values side, Adobe won 3%, the day after a quarterly publication by the software publisher deemed ‘solid’, with slightly exceeded revenue expectations and positive comments on the activity.
Meta for its part rose 2.8%, driven by encouraging comments from analysts at JPMorgan, who raised their recommendation from ‘neutral’ to ‘overweight’ on the title of the parent company of Facebook.
Accenture, on the other hand, fell by 5.9%, despite an increase by the consulting and IT services group in its EPS target for the current year, on the occasion of its first quarter publication.
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