The Paris stock market has been consolidating horizontally for the past 48 hours around the 7,570-point mark.
The CAC40 now appears to be stuck between 7,550 and 7,570pts, in contact with its all-time highs.

The Euro-Stoxx50 is up 0.2% thanks to a +0.5% rise in the DAX (to 16,730) in the wake of Siemens.

The race for absolute records continues on Wall Street, with the Dow Jones up +0.3% to 37.740 and the S&P500 gaining +0.3% to 4,755.
The Nasdaq-100 (+0.4%) achieved a double feat: it beat an absolute record and then equalled its best annual performance of the century with an overall score of +53.2% (to 16,770pts).

Since Friday, several Fed members have tried to temper Wall Street's euphoria by judging market expectations too optimistic... but they are not being "heard" and the market is clinging to its hyper-optimistic expectations.
Last Friday, New York Fed President John Williams cooled the markets' ardor by declaring that it was "premature" to consider a Fed rate cut as early as March.

His counterpart at the Atlanta Fed, Raphael Bostic, echoed this view, saying that there was nothing "imminent" about an easing of the Fed's monetary policy.

It's true that some investors are even envisaging ten rate cuts by 2024, a scenario considered exaggerated by some given the persistence of inflation.

On the economic front, the upturn in housing starts (+14.8%) shows that the US real estate market is behaving paradoxically: first-time buyers are absent, no-one is selling their property to buy again (a shortage situation), so solvent buyers are building homes to their own specifications

On the other hand, building permits for US homes - which are supposed to foreshadow future housing starts - fell by 2.5%.

While the final sessions before the holidays are usually buoyant, the lingering questions surrounding interest rates could weigh on trading in the absence of any real catalysts.

With the exception of the final eurozone inflation figures for November and the latest statistics on US residential construction, today's macroeconomic agenda is sparse.

The rest of the week will nevertheless be marked on Friday by the release of the PCE inflation index in the USA - closely watched by the Fed - which will be the highlight of the week.

On the bond market, the bullish rally of recent weeks is taking a slight breather, but this remains in the nature of a consolidation or a simple technical pullback.

At around 3.895% (-3.3pts), the yield on ten-year Treasuries remains well below the technical threshold of 4%, while the yield on the German Bund for the same maturity, the benchmark for the eurozone as a whole, stands at 2.008% (-0.5pts).

In other French company news, TotalEnergies announces a second renewable electricity sales contract (CPPA) with petrochemist LyondellBasell, to which it will now supply 275 MWac (358 MW) of green electricity from its Cottonwood Bayou and Brazoria Solar farms in Texas.

Virbac says it now expects sales growth at constant exchange rates and scope of consolidation to be around 4%, rather than between 2% and 4%.

Finally, Thales announces that it has teamed up with SK Telecom (SKT), Korea's largest mobile operator, to successfully carry out advanced resistance tests in post-quantum cryptography.

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