Broadening trade clash hits equities

Chris Beauchamp IG

Heading into the close, the FTSE 100 is 40 points lower, while travel stocks are hit on more bad news from Ryanair.

Equities are still struggling to find their footing as a sea of red envelops stock markets in the US and Europe. The US-China trade dispute is now mirrored at the commercial level, between Google and Huawei, deepening the confrontation and adding more players of problems on to the existing situation. Now it is not just trade tariffs and patents that are at stake, but relations between companies. The ‘world wide web’, to use a phrase from the 1990s that seems archaic now, was one of the pillars of the globalised economy, just as an integrated China was. It makes sense to see the former being challenged at the same time as the latter, and is another reason for investors to fret about the long-term impact of the superpower clash.

The news from the travel and airline sectors has not been good of late, so it is not surprising to see further losses for Carnival and TUI on the FTSE 100. It looks like it will be a tough summer, with rising fuel costs and more strikes, even without Brexit making things worse. If budget airlines are feeling the pinch, then holiday operators will suffer too.

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Chris Beauchamp

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