Stock markets downbeat after Trump says China violates trade agreement - 2.6.2025

The Dollar weakening is intact presently. The live dollar index data show the ICE US Dollar index, a measure of the dollar’s strength against a basket of six rival currencies, slipped 0.1% on Friday.

Both EUR/USD and GBP/USD halted their advancing on Friday as the statistics office Destatis reported German inflation eased to hotter than expected 2.1% in May. USD/JPY slowed its sliding while AUD/USD ended little changed on Friday with both the Australian dollar and the yen higher against the Greenback currently.

US stock indexes futures are down currently after president Trump wrote in a social media post that China “… HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US.” Wall Street ended mixed on Friday with the three main stock benchmarks recording daily returns in the range from -0.3% to 0.1% while president Trump announced the US will double its current tariff rate on steel and aluminum imports from 25% to 50%, starting on Wednesday.

European stock futures are retreating today after closing marginally higher on Friday. Asian stock indexes futures are mostly down with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index defying the trend as Beijing refuted Washington’s claims that it had broken the Geneva trade agreement, instead accusing the US for breaching deal terms.

Brent is up currently after producer group OPEC+ decided to increase output in July by the same amount as it did in each of the prior two months. Prices ended lower on Friday while energy services firm Baker Hughes reported US energy firms cut the number of oil and natural gas rigs operating last week for a fifth week in a row to the lowest since November 2021. US West Texas Intermediate WTI futures slipped 0.25% but are higher currently. Brent fell 0.39% to $63.90 a barrel on Friday.