Buoyed by the announcement of a burst of mergers and acquisitions, Wall Street on Monday confirmed the rebound that started in last weekend. In limited volumes, it will erase all its losses from last week. All indices end in green: the Dow ends up sharply from 1.87% to 11,479.65 points. The index had opened up 0.48% to 11,323.44 points and continued to grow during the session. The Nasdaq index also closed with a gain of 1.87% to 2554.79 points.
Markets reacted to a volley of announcements of mergers and acquisitions. First, Google (-1.16% to 557.23 dollars) has announced the acquisition of the mobile phone manufacturer Motorola Mobility (55.78% to 38.12 dollars) to $ 12.5 billion in cash.Time Warner (-0.81% to 64.98 dollars), meanwhile, reached an agreement to buy the cable operator Insight Communications to Carlyle for $ 3 billion. Finally, Cargill will acquire the French specialist in animal feed Provimi to 1.5 billion euros.
As in Europe, investors are upbeat on the eve of an important meeting between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the reform of the governance of the euro area. They should discuss ways to implement to prevent contagion problems of sovereign debt to the rest of the region.
But Germany has already warned investors: this meeting will lead to "nothing spectacular"."It will be a working meeting on the governance of the euro area in line with European decisions taken in late July," said the spokesman of the Ministry of Finance. The latter also confirmed the skepticism German, joined by France, in respect of Eurobonds. These ads have already resulted in demoralizing the European investors.
In Asia, the announcement of a contraction much weaker than expected Japanese GDP has also reassured the markets.
Morale builders stable
The statistics published on Monday in the U.S. are, however, bleak. Manufacturing activity in the New York area declined for the third consecutive month at -7.7, 3.9 points lower than in July.
In real estate, the NAHB index released on Monday shows that the morale of the manufacturers was unchanged in August, close to its lowest historical levels.
Note that the currency market, the euro strengthened against the greenback at 1.444 dollar. Oil markets, oil prices closed up in New York. A barrel of "light sweet crude" for September delivery was trading at 87.88 dollars, up 2.50 dollar. Prices had fallen during the European trading, erasing their gains made in Asian trade in a market nervous and still haunted by persistent concerns about global growth and the debt crisis in the eurozone.A barrel of Brent North Sea crude for September delivery was trading at 107.56 dollars on the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in London, down 47 cents from Friday's close.
Google swallows Motorola Mobility
On the corporate side, Bank of America (7.93% to 7.76 dollars) has announced the sale of its activities in the international credit cards in Britain, Ireland or Canada.
The food distributor Sysco (-3.93% to 28.11 dollars) announced earnings per share (EPS), diluted to 57 cents under its fourth quarter, diluted EPS of $ 1.96 for all of its financial year, while its quarterly sales reached $ 10.4 billion.
Estee Lauder fell 6.64% to 94.15 dollars.Despite the publication of a net income group share record of $ 700.8 million, up 46.5%, the cosmetics group announced its annual results would be below Wall Street expectations.
Lowe (0.82% to 19.58 dollars) has already reported sales below expectations in the second quarter of its fiscal year and lowered its annual targets for the second time in three months, consumers pushing their development projects until later because of sluggish growth.
Boeing (1.54% to 62.70 dollars) announced it had completed with Air Lease Corp. an order valued at $ 2.5 billion on 14 737-800 aircraft and five 777-300ER.
Pfizer (2.69% to 18.34 dollars) announced Monday it had won before a U.S. court case against Teva Pharmaceutical Industries of Israel, preventing the global generics to produce a copy of Viagra before 2019 .
Transocean (2.97% to 57.26 dollars), listed in New York, wants to buy the Norwegian group Aker Drilling, for a total of 1.1 billion Swiss francs (1 billion), according to a statement Monday. Several large shareholders, representing 65% of the capital, have agreed to the deal, said the Swiss.
The American specialist craft materials Grainger (2.01% to 138.57 dollars) on Monday announced the acquisition of the Dutch distributor of fasteners Fabory Group for $ 344 million (242 million).