Equities catch a breath, focus shifts to the US inflation data

Summary:

• European equities trade subtly higher on Thursday

• Wall Street futures point for a higher opening in the US

• ECB minutes and US inflation data in the spotlight for the remainder of the day

Thursday is marked with a moderate rebound across equity markets after yesterday’s rout. However, not every European market is trading higher today. Russian equities post quite a severe declines. On the currency front CAD and AUD outperform other majors while Japanese yen is the weakest out of G19 basket. Moving onto the commodity market we are observing decent rise in the oil price while precious metals remain muted.

Cryptocurrencies have a lot of enthusiasts, but also a lot of critics. Joseph Stiglitz may be easily classified to the latter group. The famous economist joins a group of sceptical scholars towards virtual currencies. Recently, the Nobel Prize winner has forecasted that digital currencies will be “regulated into oblivion”.

The Swedish krona weakened slightly in the aftermath of the June’s inflation report as well as Riksbank minutes even as the central bank seemed to remain on course to deliver a rate increase later this year. As of 9:00 am BST the SEK is placed among the worst performing currencies in the G10 basket.

Following an upbeat Asian session stock markets in Europe opened mostly in green. Russian equities can be named underperformers as RTS index is the only major European index to open with a downside price gap. Refiners are the biggest underperformers in the first minutes of trade on the Old Continent.

Anyway, several hours after the Donald Trump administration had announced that it planned to slap China with another package of duties, China responded that appropriate countermeasures would be undertaken. Meanwhile, an indirect step might have been already made taking into consideration what happened with the onshore yuan against the US dollar overnight.