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Today’s FOMC meeting remained the focus of investor attention in yesterday’s session, with markets currently pricing in the Fed to keep rates unchanged. On the data front, US new home construction fell to its lowest level since 2020 as higher mortgage rates in August appear to have cooled demand.

Investors began the week focused on Wednesday’s FOMC meeting and weighing the impact of the steady rise in crude oil prices, with the Brent benchmark rising a further 0.7% during the session. In this context, European sovereign bond yields rose across the board, as did US short-term benchmarks.

Financial markets ended the week digesting Thursday’s ECB rate decision. If investors initially interpreted Lagarde’s speech as implying a slightly dovish bias going forward, several ECB officials pushed back against such interpretations on Friday, pushing European sovereign bond yields up, peripheral spreads to widen, and a steepening of the curve.

In yesterday's session, investors' attention focused on the ECB monetary policy meeting, where interest rates were hiked by 25bp to 4.0% (depo) and 4.5% (refi). More importantly, the ECB said that these levels, if maintained for a sufficiently long period, might not need to be raised further to return inflation back to 2%.

In yesterday’s session, investors traded cautiously as they awaited  key economic data later this week (US CPI inflation) and the ECB monetary policy decision on Thursday. The main economic event yesterday was the downward revision of the European Commission’s summer GDP forecasts.

Investors ended the week on a cautious note: trading volumes were light and most asset prices were little changed. Sovereign bond yields were largely unchanged in the eurozone, while rising slightly in the US despite most Fed officials who spoke in recent weeks tended to lean towards a pause in the hiking cycle at the September meeting.

With little novelties on the data front, investors started the week resuming their positioning to higher rates for longer selling off sovereign bonds, bringing yields up again. The surge was greater on long-term references and widespread across developed economies, with the US 10-year benchmark rising 9 bps. to hit multi-year highs.

In yesterday’s session, investor sentiment was soured by data showing the resilience of the US economy and its labour market. Private surveys showed that US companies added the most jobs in over a year in June, and the services sector expanded faster than expected, which investors fear will allow the Fed to continue raising rates.

A lower-than-expected reading of June’s US inflation led investors to project a lower path for the Federal Reserve’s interest rates. Concretely, headline and core inflation fell by 1pp and 0.5pp to 3.0% y/y and 4.8% y/y, respectively.

Investors started the week trading with a more subdued tone, with sentiment soured by data showing a slowdown in China in Q2 and by lingering inflationary concerns on the back of upside tensions in some agricultural prices.

A lower-than-expected inflation data in the UK reinforced hopes among investors that disinflationary pressures are gaining traction, triggering a sharp depreciation of the British pound and a drop in the country’s sovereign debt yields.

Investors continued to trade with a cautious tone on Thursday, taking on board a new bath of data pointing to moderating inflationary pressures in Europe and a tight labour market in the US.

In the last session of the week, investors traded cautiously in absence of key macroeconomic data releases and as they waited for monetary policy meetings this week in the main central banks.

The global economic outlook centered the stage in yesterday’s session as investors focused on July’s flash PMIs. In the euro area, the soft growth momentum was visible in the fall of the services (51.1) and manufacturing (42.7) indices. In the US, the manufacturing PMI rose and got closer to the 50-point threshold, but the services PMI lost steam.

In yesterday’s session, investors weighed mixed signals from economic sentiment indicators in the US and in Germany. While the Conference Board consumer sentiment indices rose in July, signaling that private consumption might still have room to grow in Q3, the German IFO moderated.

The US Federal Reserve meeting centered the stage in yesterday's session with a 25bp interest rate hike, as expected by the consensus. The description of the economic outlook was very similar to June's, while the president Jerome Powell recognized that the last CPI inflation release surprised them slightly on the positive side.

The last stages of this cycle of monetary policy tightening centered the stage in yesterday’s session as the ECB hiked interest rates by 25bp (depo at 3.75% and refi at 4.25%). Nevertheless, Christine Lagarde said that this might not be the last hike and insisted that interest rates will remain high for a long period of time to break the back of inflation.

Greetings back to work in a week beginning with the downbeat echoes of Friday, when investors traded in a risk-averse mood. Sovereign bond yields ended the week sliding across the board, especially in Europe, and so did stocks, with the biggest falls in China. The USD was broadly flat, while commodities rose slightly.

Yesterday’s session saw thin trading volumes in the market due to a holiday in the US. Chinese stocks ended higher, as authorities stepped up efforts to support a struggling property sector. The Shanghai CSI 300 index was up 1.4%, led by strong gains in developer companies, and drove stocks up all across Asia.

In yesterday's session, economic data releases continued to center the stage. In the US, Q2 GDP figures were revised downwards from 2.4% q/q SAAR to 2.1%, while, in the euro area, country members' inflation figures failed to prove a decisive trend towards the 2%. Euro area aggregate data will be released today.