The Paris stock market is trading at equilibrium, around 7460 points, despite marked declines for Teleperformance (-4.3%) and STMicro (-1.3%).

A certain wait-and-see attitude seems to prevail ahead of the ECB's press release scheduled for 2:15pm, even though the Frankfurt-based institution is not expected to announce any major changes on this occasion.

In the wake of rather reassuring inflation data, equity markets have begun to speculate on further key rate cuts by the ECB in the months ahead.

Speaking at the Davos Economic Forum last week, however, ECB President Christine Lagarde said that rate cuts were 'likely' in the summer, rather than in the spring.

Overall, analysts expect the ECB to reiterate its wait-and-see stance today, while reiterating once again its dependence on data.

Everything suggests that the ECB will pass today," predicts Christopher Dembik, Investment Strategy Advisor at Pictet AM.

"The central bank should avoid committing itself to a precise timetable for rate cuts as long as the pace of inflation, and in particular the profile of the wage rate (...), presents uncertainties," he explains.

At 2.30pm, investors will also be watching for the first estimate of US gross domestic product (GDP) for the fourth quarter, whose growth is expected to have slowed to 2% over the last three months of the year, following a gain of 4.9% in the third quarter.

In the meantime, we note that in January 2024, the business climate in France was stable compared with December 2023, according to the Insee synthetic indicator, which remained at 98, a level slightly below its long-term average (100).

Still on the statistics front, the business climate in Germany deteriorated in January, confirming the recessionary dynamic in which Europe's leading economy is evolving, according to the monthly survey published on Thursday by the Ifo institute.

The Ifo index - calculated from a sample of some 9,000 companies - came out at 85.2 this month, compared with 86.3 in December, while economists were on average expecting a slight improvement to 86.6.

On the foreign exchange market, the euro was stable against the greenback, at around $1.089/E.

In French company news, STMicroelectronics reported net income for the last quarter of 2023 down 13.8% to $1.08 billion, or $1.14 per share, with an operating margin of 23.9%, compared with 29.1% for the same period last year.

Publicis Groupe reports anticipated net income growth of 4.2% to 13.1 billion euros for 2023, with organic growth of +6.3%, above the +5.5-6% target range raised last October.

Finally, TotalEnergies announces that it has been selected, with its partner Corio Generation, for their offshore wind project Attentive Energy Two for a 20-year contract to supply 1.34 GW of renewable electricity to the US state of New Jersey.

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