After being closed on Monday for Independence Day, US markets closed the trading day strongly yesterday, and key markets opened with a flourish today.

Following on from last week’s bounce, many key markets kept up their positive momentum into this week.

Markets have had a strong to start to the week. Sentiment was helped after Biden spoke early in the week to reiterate that a US recession isn’t inevitable, quoting the country’s low unemployment as a reason to be optimistic.

It was initially a difficult start to the week, driven in part by Friday’s higher than expected US CPI reading, which we discussed last week. However, we saw some green shoots from Chinese data this morning.

Following a long weekend of jubilation here in the UK, markets have broadly been flat.
On Monday, we saw a vote of confidence in the UK Prime Minister; ultimately Boris Johnson secured the confidence of his colleagues, but the margin was tighter than anticipated.

In place of our usual market update, the Investment Management team have provided a short Q&A with two of our Fund Managers to discuss raising inflation.

We’ve had some detail from China this week on plans in place to loosen the lockdowns in Shanghai: shops will begin to open this week, further restrictions will ease towards the end of the week, public transport will start back up and further normality will return from 1st June.

The big news to start the week was the result of the French Presidential run-off election on Sunday. Sitting President Emanuel Macron held off his far-right opposition leader, Marine Le Pen

It has been a quiet week, with few market moving headlines, which isn’t a bad thing after a tumultuous month. Markets have now largely made up lost ground after the chasm created in the last 5 weeks.

There were peace talks between Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday, that made the “most significant progress” that we have seen since Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February – Russia will drastically scale down military operations around Kyiv, and Ukraine said they were willing to adopt a neutral status.