Global equities rose on Tuesday while US Treasury yields fell as investors awaited release of the Federal Reserve’s meeting minutes for clues on US interest rates and as China’s COVID restrictions weighed on sentiment.
The Fed will release minutes of its November policy meeting on Wednesday, offering a glimpse of how officials view economic conditions.
In China, authorities in Beijing shut parks and museums. In Shanghai rules were tightened for people entering the city as the country grapples with a spike in COVID cases, sparking worries about its impact on the economy.
”People are going to be poring over word-for-word those minutes to see if it will tilt towards the Fed’s official statement versus what Powell’s press conference implied, which was that they are not going to be looking at cumulative effect in considering when to stop this tightening,” said Tom Plumb, portfolio manager at Plumb Balanced Fund in Madison, Wisconsin.
The MSCI All-World index of shares rose 0.72 percent, while European shares gained 0.80 percent.
Benchmark 10-year Treasury yields were down to 3.79 percent while the yield on the two-year note was up slightly at 4.5 percent.
On Wall Street, all three main indexes were trading higher led by gains in consumer discretionary, technology, financials, healthcare, and energy.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.82 percent to 33,975.84, the S&P 500 gained 0.75 percent to 3,979.68 and the Nasdaq Composite added 0.52 percent to 11,081.99.
”We’re seeing technology, consumer discretionary and energy leading downside momentum while consumer staples stocks leading the upside, these are signs of investors positioning for a downturn,” said Michael Ashley Schulman, chief investment officer at Running Point Capital in Los Angeles, California.
The US dollar retreated across the board, ceding some of the ground gained in the previous session, as investors looked past worries about China’s COVID flare-ups, boosting demand for more risky currencies. The dollar index fell 0.33 percent, with the euro up 0.31 percent to $1.0273.
