Benchmarks rose in Frankfurt, London and Tokyo and fell in Paris and Hong Kong. Oil prices also gained.On Friday the S&P 500 dipped more than 20% below its peak set early this year before buying late in the day gave it a tiny gain. It finished 18.7% below its record. That capped a seventh straight losing week, the longest since 2001, when the dot-com bubble was deflating.
Britain's FTSE 100 rose 1.1% in midday trading, while Germany's DAX gained 0.8% and the CAC 40 in Paris picked up 0.3%.Visiting Japan, President Joe Biden launched a fresh U.S. initiative on economic cooperation and trade. Called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, the White House said it will help the United States and Asian economies work more closely on issues including supply chains, digital trade, clean energy, worker protections and anticorruption efforts.
But analysts said the policy stance of the newly elected administration was not significantly different from the incumbent government and major changes were not expected. Hong Kong-traded shares in food delivery company Meituan lost 3.1% while e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding gave up 3.4%. With inflation at its highest level in four decades, the Fed has switched from keeping interest rates super-low to support markets and the economy and is raising rates and making other moves to tamp down inflation. The worry is it might go too far or too quickly.