World stock markets rise, last week's jump largest since November

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - Stock prices on world markets rose sharply last week as investors expect an acceleration of economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis thanks to additional stimulus measures and faster implementation of vaccination against Covid-19.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones rose 3.9 percent last week, to 31,148 points, while the S&P 500 jumped 4.65 percent, to 3,886 points, and the Nasdaq index 6 percent, to 13,856 points.

This is the largest weekly jump for these indices since the beginning of November, so they have recovered all losses from the previous week and reached new all-time highs.

The biggest support for the market comes from investors' hopes that the US Congress will soon accept President Joe Biden's proposal for an additional economic stimulus package worth $1.9 trillion.

Investors were encouraged by news of progress in the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines. They hope that accelerating vaccination will contribute to the acceleration of the global economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis.

Thanks to this, the MSCI ACWI index of the 50 largest world stock exchanges approached a record level on Friday.

“Markets are mostly driven by a strong recovery in company earnings. In addition, there is a lot of money in funds that will likely be invested in stocks when the economic situation normalizes after vaccination,” says Jumpei Tanaka, strategist at Pictet.

In addition, the situation is calming down after the world's largest stock exchange was recently shaken by the battle between small investors gathered on the social network Reddit, who were raising the price of GameStop shares, and investment hedge funds, which were betting on a price drop and lost billions of dollars.

Stock prices also rose sharply on European stock exchanges last week. The STOXX 600 index of leading European stocks jumped 3.5 percent.

The London FTSE index rose 1.3 percent, to 6,489 points, while the Frankfurt DAX jumped 4.6 percent, to 14,056 points, and the Paris CAC 4.8 percent, to 5,659 points.

On the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Nikkei index rose 4 percent, to 28,779 points.

(agencies)