The three Wall Street indices lost more than 1.5% on Thursday due to the difficulties encountered by Silicon Valley Bank, a Californian establishment close to the technology sector.
These fears have spread to European and Asian stock markets.
Paris fell by 1.77%, London by 1.62%, Frankfurt by 1.68% and Milan by 2.06% around 08:40 GMT.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange lost 1.67%, Shanghai 1.40% and Hong Kong fell 3.04%, penalized by the disappointing results fell from the Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com.
SVB Financial Group on Wednesday announced a major capital raise and the hasty sale of assets, which resulted in an estimated loss of $1.8 billion.
SVB is thus seeking to increase its liquidity to strengthen its balance sheet, weakened by customer withdrawals, themselves in difficulty by the rise in interest rates.
Investors’ fears were heightened by the fact that the parent company of another bank, Silvergate Bank, announced on Wednesday that the establishment was going into liquidation.
“While Silvergate Capital’s fall was primarily crypto-asset related and did not raise concerns for the rest of the banking industry, SVB’s plunge fueled fears that the rest of banks might also experience similar issues,” worries Ipek Ozkardeskaya, an analyst at Swissquote Bank.
“We had zero rates for several years and the banks operated in a certain way,” commented Jens Nordvig of Exante Data and Market Reader. “Some banks will encounter difficulties in the face of a totally different environment”.
Stephen Innes, analyst at SPI Asset Management, however, wants to be reassuring and explains that “the risk of contagion from small to large banks is low” given the current regulations.
Securities of banking groups fell on various stock exchanges.
Societe Generale fell by 5.41% in Paris, Deutsche Bank by 8.23% in Frankfurt, Unicredit by 4.75% in Milan, Barclays by 5.48% in London around 08:35 GMT.
In Tokyo, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (-6.12%), and Nomura Holdings (-3.57%) were penalized.
In Hong Kong, Bank of China lost 1.35% and China Construction Bank 1.21%.
Conversely, less risky assets were highly sought following. Gold jumped Thursday, over two days it posted an increase of 1.10% to 1,833.31 dollars an ounce.
Bond yields, which move in the opposite direction to bond prices, fell, also a sign of a rush by investors to safe-haven assets. The interest rate of the German 10-year debt was worth 2.49% once morest 2.64% at the close of the previous day. US rates also fell on Thursday.
On the other hand, bitcoin fell by more than 7% since Thursday evening and fell back below 20,000 dollars for the first time since January.
American employment in the sights
Investors are also nervous ahead of the release of the February US jobs report, the data of which will be scrutinized by the US Federal Reserve (Fed) and might be decisive in deciding the scale of the next rate hike in the economy. ‘institution.
These figures “might shed more light on the strength of the US economy,” said Stephen Innes, analyst at SPI AM.
JD.Com disappoints
JD.com shares fell more than 11% in Hong Kong following quarterly results slightly below analysts’ figures, on average, which indicate a sharp deceleration in its growth.
On the side of currencies and oil
On the foreign exchange market, the yen retreated once morest the main other currencies following the maintenance of the ultra-accommodating monetary policy of the Bank of Japan (BoJ), at the end of the last meeting chaired by its outgoing governor Haruhiko Kuroda.
It lost 0.18% to 136.41 yen per dollar.
The euro yielded 0.03% to 1.0578 dollars for one euro.
Oil prices fell around 0830 GMT, a barrel of US WTI was worth 74.90 dollars (-1.08%) and a barrel of Brent from the North Sea (-0.92%) was trading at 80.82 dollars .
