Interest rates are upside down – what that means for the markets

Frankfurt Go then. The purchasing managers’ indices for Germany and the euro zone came out better than expected this week, and on Thursday the Ifo business climate index surprised on the upside.

The uncertainty about the energy supply and thus the production conditions in the coming months is slowly decreasing, and companies are looking to the future with somewhat more optimism. Ulrich Kater, chief economist at Dekabank, puts it in a nutshell: “The recession is losing its terror.”

Investors on the stock markets have been playing out exactly this scenario for some time and also assume that the central banks will slowly slow down their rate hikes. The minutes of the US Federal Reserve’s most recent interest rate meeting, published after the German stock market closed on Wednesday, confirmed this expectation.

Accordingly, the leading US index S&P 500 said goodbye to the trade-free Thanksgiving day with a further plus of 0.6 percent. The German leading index Dax gained 0.8 percent on Thursday to 14,540 points.