Stocks plummet as Trade War gathers momentum

Summary:

• Trade tensions sink equities around the world

• Cryptocurrencies show resilience to the ongoing turmoil

• Oil pulls back ahead of the API inventories data (9:30 pm BST)

Stock markets around the globe continue to bleed amid rising tensions between US and China. Another round of heavy selling stormed markets as world’s two biggest economies prepare for another tariff trade-off. In turn we are observing gains among safe haven assets like CHF and JPY. Soybean is among the worst performing commodities today. Moreover, we are observing declines on the oil market ahead of the API reading scheduled for late evening.

While equity investors are counting their losses resulting from the ongoing turmoil on the stock markets the same cannot be said about cryptocurrency traders. The capitalization of the whole market jumped significantly from $275 billion to almost $290 on the reports that one of the payment companies was granted a license to trade digital assets.

Several days ago European equity investors cheered when the DE30 war running close to its local peak placed nearby 13200 points. This move was predominantly steered by receding odds as far as the first ECB deposit rate increase is concerned which dragged the shared currency heavily down.

It looks like an end of trade tensions between the US and China has just become more distant after the latest statement released by the White House. President Donald Trump has ordered to identify up to $200 billion Chinese goods for which new levies might be put should China "refuses to change its practices, and also if it insists on going forward with the new tariffs that it has recently announced".

Oil traders were offered quite decent headlines yesterday that an output increase, a theme which is likely to be brought up during the OPEC/non-OPEC meeting in Vienna later this week, might be much lower than initially thought.