(CercleFinin.com) - The trend, clearly positive at the start of the morning (with fairly homogeneous rises of around +0.9% shortly after the opening) turned around fairly quickly, and US indices were already posting declines of around -1% by mid-session.
Wall Street ended close to the day's lows: the Dow Jones limited the damage with -0.65% (thanks to Goldman Sachs +2.9%, United Health +1.5%, Verizon +1%), while the S&P 500 sank by 1.20% (as much as on Friday).
The Nasdaq index fell 1.8% in the wake of Salesforce -7.1%, Tesla -5.6%, Zscaler -3.6%, Autodesk -3.1%, Netflix, Broadcom and Nvidia -2.5%, Apple -2.2%, Microsoft -2%, AMD and Alphabet -1.8%, Paypal -1.7%, Amazon -1.4%.

The initial losses were caused by higher-than-expected retail sales (rate pressure detrimental to the 'technos'), and then worsened as the Israeli army's Chief of Staff, General Herzi Halevi, dashed hopes that tensions would ease as Joe Biden had hoped, by stating that his country would 'retaliate' for the Iranian attack at the weekend (historically, Israel has always retaliated to attacks against it).

Geopolitical tensions are therefore resurfacing, as are fears that the FED will only cut rates twice this year (instead of the 6 or 7 times anticipated at the start of 2024).
The deterioration in US bond markets has been amplified by US retail sales figures that came in above expectations.
The US 10-year is up almost +15pts to 4.64%... and the 2-year has just flirted with 5.000% (4.999%).

US retail sales rose by 0.7% sequentially in March, ahead of market expectations, following a 0.9% increase the previous month (revised from an initial estimate of +0.6%).

The Commerce Department, which publishes these figures, states that excluding the automotive sector (vehicles and equipment), US retail sales rose by 1.1% last month, following a 0.6% increase in February.

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