【今日短语】
prop up
- lean something against something else.
"she propped the picture up on the mantlepiece"
- provide support or assistance for a person or thing that would otherwise fail or decline.
"these attempts to prop up struggling industries are foolish"
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原文如下：
The day in the markets
by Harriet Clarfelt, Chris Flood and Hudson Lockett
(来自：The Financial Time 金融时报)
What you need to know
• Stocks and bond prices fall as central banks turn screws on policy
• Yields surge for US Treasuries and UK gilts
• Dollar under pressure after Japan intervenes to prop up yen
Stocks and government bond prices fell yesterday as more of the world’s central banks joined the US Federal Reserve in raising interest rates to curb persistently high inflation.
Wall Street’s S&P 500 share gauge was down 0.8 per cent by the early afternoon in New York, extending declines from the previous session.
The Nasdaq Composite, which is stacked full of technology companies that are more sensitive to changes in borrowing costs, lost 1.5 per cent.
Across the Atlantic, the Stoxx Europe 600 index closed 1.8 per cent lower.
Those moves in equity markets came after the Fed raised interest rates 0.75 percentage points on Wednesday, marking the third consecutive increase of such magnitude and taking the central bank’s target range to 3 to 3.25 per cent.
Other central banks joined the week’s tightening trend yesterday with the Bank of England lifting its key lending rate by 0.5 percentage points to 2.25 per cent and the Swiss National Bank taking borrowing costs up by 0.75 percentage points to 0.5 per cent.
The decision, framed by analysts at ING as “the end of an era”, marked a shift into positive territory by the SNB for the first time since 2015.
Concerns have intensified in recent months that interest rates will climb around the world to levels that exacerbate an economic downturn as authorities strive to tame rapid price growth.
The yield on the 10-year US Treasury note, seen as a proxy for global borrowing costs, jumped 17 basis points to 3.68 per cent as the price of the debt instrument fell. The policy-sensitive two-year yield rose 14bp to 4.13 per cent.
Other government bonds also came under pressure with the 10-year UK gilt yield surging 18bp to 3.49 per cent and the equivalent German Bund yield adding 7bp to 1.97 per cent.
In currencies, the dollar slipped 0.2 per cent against a basket of six peers, trimming declines that were fuelled earlier in the session by Japan intervening to prop up the yen for the first time in 24 years.
The dollar’s decline came as the yen rose as much as 2.6 per cent to ¥140.36 against the dollar after Japan’s top currency official said the government had taken “decisive action” to address a “rapid and one-sided” move in the foreign exchange market. Tokyo last bought US dollars to defend the yen in 1998.
