European equity markets bounced strongly on Tuesday, taking their lead from Wall Street\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s biggest daily advance since 2003.<\/p>\n
The FTSE Eurofirst 300 climbed 1.1 per cent to 1,520.05, Frankfurt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Xetra Dax added 0.9 per cent to 7,512.69, the CAC 40 in Paris gained 1.5 per cent to 5,615.78 and London\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s FTSE 100 rose 1.2 per cent to 6,263.<\/p>\n
Recently embattled financial stocks gained some relief as Bear Stearns, the US investment bank whose subprime mortgage-focused hedge funds were at the centre of recent credit market woes, bounced strongly on Wall Street overnight.<\/p>\n
Standard & Poor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, the debt rating agency which downgraded its outlook on Bear Stearns to negative on Friday, said on Monday that the market\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s response – a near 12 per cent fall – was \u00e2\u20ac\u009da vast overreaction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n
Europe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s large investment banks followed with rallies of their own. France\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s BNP Paribas climbed 3.2 per cent to \u00e2\u201a\u00ac82.52 and Societe Generale rose 3.8 per cent to \u00e2\u201a\u00ac133.15, while Germany\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Deutsche Bank rose 3.6 per cent to \u00e2\u201a\u00ac101 and Credit Suisse, the Swiss investment bank and wealth manager, added 3.5 per cent to SFr82.35.<\/p>\n
French lender Natixis climbed a further 6.5 per cent to \u00e2\u201a\u00ac15.54, adding to Monday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 6.1 per cent advance when it issued a statement to reassure investors that its exposure to subprime would be negligible.<\/p>\n
UBS upgraded Natixis from \u00e2\u20ac\u009dsell\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to \u00e2\u20ac\u009dneutral\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, saying Monday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s statement had reduced the implied risk premium in the stock. Cheuvreux, the French broker, cited similar reasons for its upgrade from \u00e2\u20ac\u009dunderperform\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to \u00e2\u20ac\u009doutperform\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n
Dexia advanced 3.4 per cent to \u00e2\u201a\u00ac21.25 after the Franco-Belgian lender issued a statement following Monday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s market close that it too was \u00e2\u20ac\u009dwell protected\u00e2\u20ac\u009d from subprime market losses.<\/p>\n
Among the companies reporting second-quarter profits, Swedbank announced unexpectedly strong operating profit in spite of cooling in lending growth in Baltic countries. The stock climbed 3.7 per cent to SKr249.50.<\/p>\n
Bayer, the German drugs and chemicals group, rose 0.6 per cent to \u00e2\u201a\u00ac52.55 after reporting a forecast-beating 30 per cent increase in second-quarter operating profit.<\/p>\n
German cosmetics group Beiersdorf climbed 2.7 per cent to \u00e2\u201a\u00ac50.25 after unveiling a better-than-expected 20 per cent rise in second-quarter core earnings. The Nivea cream maker said growth in emerging markets and rapid expansion in sales of its men\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cosmetics range drove profits in the quarter.<\/p>\n
Norsk Hydro, the Norwegian oil and aluminium group, gained 3.7 per cent to NKr215 after Eivind Reiten, president and chief executive, moved to calm the controversy surrounding payments related to the termination of stock options by giving up a portion of the NKr27.7m he was scheduled to receive.<\/p>\n
Other board members followed suit by relinquishing 30 per cent of their expected payments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
European equity markets bounced strongly on Tuesday, taking their lead from Wall Street\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s biggest daily advance since 2003. The FTSE<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}