Europe close: Late rally pushes Stoxx 600 modestly higher
By Benjamin Chiou
Date: Tuesday 22 Apr 2025
(Sharecast News) - Markets across Europe managed to push higher by Tuesday's close as traders returned to their desks following the four-day Easter weekend, with sentiment helped by a strong rebound on Wall Street.
The Stoxx 600, which had been trading in the red for most of the session, rallied into the close to finish 0.3% higher at 507.71 - its highest since 15 April. All major indices closed with gains, with the exception of the FTSE MIB in Milan, which slipped 0.1%.
Wall Street's three main markets were seeing gains of 2.5-3.0% in morning trade in New York, bouncing back after dropping by a similar amount the day before.
While European markets were closed on Monday, US indices suffered a steep sell-off on the back of an escalation in tensions between the White House and Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell over interest rate cuts, with an enraged Trump calling the central bank chief - whom he appointed - a "loser".
Powell said last week that with elevated uncertainty surrounding the impact of President Trump's recently implemented tariffs on the US economy, he now expects to see inflation rise and growth slow.
Powell said Trump's tariffs were "likely to move us further away" from its goals for "the balance of this year", while Chicago Fed head Austan Goolsbee cautioned that the tariffs will potentially cause the US economy to "fall off" by the summer.
In other news, gold prices hit another record high, briefly topping the $3,500 mark for the first time as concerns about the US economy continued to spur a flight to safety. By late-afternoon trading, bullion futures were 0.4% higher at $3,439.30 an ounce. Meanwhile, Brent crude was up 2.6% at $67.95 a barrel.
"Looking at today's rebound for equities, you might be forgiven for thinking that financial markets have forgotten all about Trump's threats to fire Powell. Volatility on both up and down days is a given right now, but Tesla's earnings tonight could well determine the near-term direction," said Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG.
"In the short-term, the path of least resistance seems to point higher, especially since the real impact of tariffs is unlikely to show up in this quarter's round of reports."
Market movers
Shares in Roche finished slightly lower after the Swiss healthcare giant Roche announced that it is planning to spend $50bn in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics in the US over the next five years. As the industry shifts more investment to the US to get around the Trump's tariffs on US imports, Roche said once its new and expanded manufacturing capacity becomes operational, it will export more medicines from the US than it imports.
Novo Nordisk shares slumped on news that an experimental pill made by US rival Eli Lily worked as well as the Danish drugmaker's blockbuster drug Ozempic to lower weight and blood sugar in a trial of diabetes patients
London-listed DCC fell after selling its healthcare division to HealthCo Investment for a total enterprise value of £1.05bn. The company said it would return surplus capital to shareholders "while maintaining a strong, investment-grade balance sheet".
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