Wall Street suffered a rare intraday reversal (around -2% in a straight line from 7.30pm to 10pm) following a statement by Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari: he warned that "if inflation continued to follow a pattern of declining rates and occasional spikes, the question would arise as to whether to forego any rate cuts this year" (he was leaning towards two rate cuts in 2024, provided that prices continued their downward trend).

The Dow Jones fell from +0.5% to -1.35%, at 38,597, the S&P500 from +0.75% (within 0.15% of its highs) to -1.23%, at 5,147, and the Nasdaq Composite from +1.1% to -1.4%, at 16,049.

The "tech" index experienced one of its biggest intraday swings of the year, and not "in a good way", following supported sell-offs on AMD -8.3%, KLA -3.6%, Nvidia and Broadcom -3.4%, Micron -3.1%, Marvell -2.9%, Alphabet -2.8%, Qualcomm -2.4%....

Reminder: Wall Street had gained +16% in nine weeks at the end of 2023 on expectations of seven to eight easings of the cost of money in 2024.

As a sign of the stress that shook Wall Street, the VIX, which in the morning was in the "complacent" zone at around 13.75, jumped +15% to 16.5, the biggest movement since February 13 and above all the most negative since October 13, 2023 (16.7/19.3).

Investors also took note of a series of statistics on Thursday: the US trade deficit stood at $68.9 billion in February, up 1.9% on the previous month.

The Labor Department announced 221,000 new jobless claims in the US for last week, a figure up 9,000 on the previous week's revised figure (212,000 instead of 210,000).

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