Asian trading continueв this morning on a mixed trend as well, with a tendency for index declines, with the Tokyo stock exchange having dropped 0.5%, the Hong Kong exchange having dropped 0.8%, the Taiwan exchange having dived by 1.3%, whereas the Seoul exchange climbed by 0.8%. In the Asian macroeconomic sphere, the Tokyo Ministry of Commerce announced yesterday that industrial production in Japan had climbed by 1% in November, while the Japanese consumer price index had dropped at an annualized rate of 0.5%, as predicted by analysts.
In the American macroeconomic sphere, the consumer confidence index was published yesterday in the United States, recording an unexpected decline in December due to concerns over the state of the labor market. The index had declined to a level of 52.5 points in December, despite economists' predictions that it would climb to a level of 56.9. The consumer expectations index dropped to a level of 71.9 in December, as compared to a level of 73.6 in November.
Furthermore in the macroeconomic sphere, disappointing data had been published in the United States real estate market. The Case-Shiller home price index for the 20 largest cities in the United States has shown that the home prices in these cities had declined in October at a sharper rate than expected, another sign that the United States labor market is still slow to recover.
In Europe, the central statistics bureau in France had reported that the country's GDP grew slower than expected in the third quarter. The French economy grew by 0.3% in the third quarter, as compared to a 0.4% growth in the past month. The trade in Europe's stock markets had locked on a mixed trend yesterday, with the Frankfurt stock exchange having grown 0.02%, the Paris exchange having declined by 0.1%, and the Madrid exchange having climbed by 0.1%.
