Day: March 7, 2024

Europe’s stock markets have beaten Wall Street by the biggest margin in more than three decades over recent months as its economy looks set to dodge a recession many thought inevitable just a few weeks ago.

Since late September, European market benchmarks have risen by 20 percentage points more than Wall Street — the largest outperformance seen in a four-month period in the past 30 years. 

Though over the past two weeks, Europe’s stocks have posted slightly smaller gains than US equities, this has done “little to erode their outperformance since September,” Graham Secker, chief European equity strategist at Morgan Stanley, told CNN. 

The overall rise is a reversal of a 15-year trend that has seen US stock indices, flush with fast-growing tech companies, consistently beat those across the Atlantic.

“It had been quite a sharp turnaround and the sharpest in a while,” Thomas Mathews, senior markets economist at Capital Economics, told CNN.

In a note earlier this month, Morgan Stanley said the reversal was driven by a combination of falling gas prices and better-than-expected economic data in Europe, as well as China’s swift reopening.

Similarly, Mathews at Capital Economics noted that the “steady outperformance” of European stocks can be dated back to a decline in European wholesale gas prices from their all-time high reached in late August. Europe’s benchmark gas contract is now trading at €57 ($62) per megawatt hour, sharply down from the peak of €346 ($375) per megawatt hour.

Consumer price inflation in the region has also ticked down in recent months. In the countries that use the euro, inflation fell from a record high of 10.6% in October to 8.5% in January, preliminary data from the EU statistics office showed on Wednesday. 

More broadly, investors have been encouraged by Europe’s economic resilience over the past year. GDP in the eurozone grew 3.5% in 2022 — more than in the United States or China — including a slight expansion in the final quarter, according to a preliminary estimate by the EU statistics office.

Hungarian photographer Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s playful portrait of her child, part of series on becoming a parent, combines humour and intimacy.

o say the subject of Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s book is a diary of motherhood doesn’t get anywhere near to the fleshy, playful vulnerability of her pictures. Titled Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back, the Hungarian photographer’s journal is a kind of traveller’s tale from the magical and estranging foreign land of childbirth. “When I realised I was pregnant,” she writes, by way of introduction, “I had no idea what awaited me. How messy and how raw, how unpredictable and how out of control motherhood really was compared to the images I had in my mind from films, photos, paintings done by men.”

Her images take you deep into that out-of-control place, her body no longer all her own, colonised by other dramatic forces. Her camera watches it all swell, as she pictures befores and afters: “Then I was an emerging artist, travelling around and going to art fairs and exhibitions and openings. Now I am a mother of two working on borrowed time hoping the years I’ve lost to mothering can be written into my CV without guilt and shame.”