World stocks were mixed on Wednesday after a shaky day on Wall Street ended a month rocked by worries about a possible recession, inflation and rising interest rates.
Germany’s DAX rose 0.5% to 14,465.06 and the CAC 40 in Paris rose 0.5% to 6,497.69. Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 0.2% to 7,619.76.
The futures for the S&P 500 rose 0.3% and the futures for the Dow Industrials rose 0.5%.
Traders were closely watching manufacturing data for Europe and the US, due later on Wednesday.
Oil prices resumed their upward trend after falling from nearly $120 a barrel on Tuesday as prices surged after the European Union agreed to block most oil imports from Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Prices finally fell Tuesday on speculation that the OPEC-Plus cartel of oil-producing nations could ease production limits and offset lost oil production from Russia. But as of late Wednesday Asian time, US crude was up $1.57 to $116.24 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It closed down 40 cents on Tuesday at $114.67.
Brent crude, the price basis for international oil trading, rose $1.50 to $117.10 a barrel.
In Asian trading, the Nikkei 225 in Tokyo rose 0.7% to 27,457.89 after Japan’s parliament approved an additional $21 billion budget to deal with soaring fuel and food prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine .
The additional budget for the current fiscal year, which began April 1, will fund part of a $48 billion emergency economic package the government passed in April. It includes subsidies for oil wholesalers to minimize the impact on consumers.
In Sydney, the S&P/ASX was up 0.3% to 7,234.00. The government reported that the economy grew at an annual rate of 3.2% or a quarterly rate of 0.8% in the first quarter of the year.
That was slower than the 3.6% growth seen in the final quarter of 2021 but still relatively strong, analysts said.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.4% to 21,323.47 and the Shanghai Composite Index slipped 0.1% to 3,182.16. Both indices rose sharply on Tuesday as Shanghai eased its strict antivirus limits on businesses and other activities.
South Korea’s markets were closed for a public holiday.
The more than 50% rise in oil prices this year is a big part of the high inflation sweeping the world. A report on Tuesday showed that inflation in the 19 countries using the euro currency hit 8.1% in May, the highest since records began in 1997.
By mid-May, the S&P 500 plummeted for seven consecutive weeks of losses, the longest such streak since the dot-com bubble collapsed two decades ago. Slowing US economic data has fueled fears that high inflation could force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates aggressively enough to trigger a recession.
Stocks have managed to avoid a full-blown bear market, at least so far, with the S&P 500 still finishing more than 20% below its record. Speculation is mounting that the Fed may consider pausing rate hikes at its September meeting.
Beginning Wednesday, the Fed will begin taking some of the trillions of dollars in Treasuries and other borrowings it has amassed during the pandemic off its balance sheet. Such a move should put upward pressure on longer-dated Treasury yields, and the Fed is doing so in an attempt to stamp out inflation by slowing the economy.
In other trading, the dollar rose to 129.47 Japanese yen from 128.70 yen on Tuesday. The euro slipped from $1.0735 to $1.0724.
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