It could have been a nice week.
Would have.
On Monday, the stock markets were still thinking: Hey, I can do what I did last week again!
2 percent weekly plus was not the world, but still an above-average price gain for five trading days.
The median value for the FAZ index is 1.46 percent - and that's only if you take weeks with price gains into account.
So it's pretty good.
But as I said: It stayed with “would have”.
Martin Hock
Editor in Business.
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Although all beginnings were easy in this case.
The one percent plus from Monday was something to be expected.
But then the stock market caught up with the reality that it is so reluctant to see, namely the uncertainty that is currently resulting from the political framework.
The EU's oil embargo on Russia, half done, pushed oil prices up and stock prices down.
And no sooner had the oil price scare dissipated than the next one came in the form of the specter that stock market traders have always feared most: monetary policy.
Once again, inflation rates turned out to be higher than desired, and unexpectedly strong growth in the US was suddenly no longer good news.
“The crucial question is whether the course correction is already pricing in a slight recession or whether there is more to come.
Such a situation can no longer be ruled out,” said Jochen Stanzl, market analyst at CMC Markets, and is therefore in good company.
Whether Citigroup, whether Rabobank, for the euro area and the coming year, a recession is slowly the so-called basic scenario.
And even if the USA still makes a strong impression on the surface, experts are seeing the first signs of a slowdown.
Or, as JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon put it: Given the many challenges, investors should prepare for an "economic hurricane" - small or even a super storm.
Hold on was Dimon's recommendation on Wednesday.
Even if the immediate causes of inflation lie outside the central banks' demand-oriented access, they must prevent inflationary impulses from becoming entrenched.
Ultimately, it is about a wage-price spiral, the danger of which is fundamentally greater than before, because the industrialized countries are facing a demographically induced shortage of labour.
But it's not all black.
As early as Thursday, falling oil prices and hopes that Saudi Arabia will fill the void left by Russia gave a boost.
And as optimists on principle, equity investors sometimes turn black into white: a weak order intake is a good sign if it means that an interest rate hike may be weaker.
But before the official labor market data from the USA, the big tremors were announced.
At the beginning of the day, people were bold, but then investors' hearts sank and prices fell.
Then the results were better than expected, it went up before you scratched your head and wondered what that all meant and it went down again.
Someone had already spat in the soup beforehand.
Him again, Mr. Tesla, the Elon.
He allegedly wrote in an email to the employees that he had “a super bad feeling about the economy”.
That's why every tenth person has to go.
And so they keep fighting.
Those who hope that everything will be fine, with those who are not so convinced that central banks change their monetary policy as quickly as investors change their portfolio positions based on economic data.
And how was the end of the week?
Friday afternoon it was: Wall Street down and Frankfurt up a bit.
Maybe it will be a great week after Pentecost.
One can wish.