“US selloff resumes as FTSE slides 2%, Japan plunges 12%”

Aug 5, 2024 | Investments

Tags: FTSE 100
An independent (financial adviser’s) view

’Not such a good day to come and see us, look at what’s happening to stock markets’, I heard on Monday, as the headline-writers sharpened their ‘£billions wiped off the value of your pensions’ pens. I couldn’t see there being grounds for a worldwide market crash. The problem was supposedly that, because ‘jobs growth’ in the US was slowing down, this could be the sign of a coming recession. Yet the big worry to date has been that their economy was ‘overheating’, creating too many jobs and so inflation, hence the reluctance to reduce interest rates. Japan, where it all started, has the opposite problem, they have just increased their interest rates from almost nothing for the first time in many years. Anyway, it turned out to be full of sound and fury and signifying nothing; thankfully, and we’re back where we pretty much were.

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