After a very busy day yesterday, the Paris Bourse is heading for a calmer session on Friday, which should enable it to post comfortable gains for the week as a whole.

At around 8:15 a.m., the future contract on the CAC 40 index - February delivery - gained 55.5 points to 7538.5, heralding a continuation of the previous day's upward movement.

The Paris market had posted an anecdotal gain of 0.1% to 7464 points yesterday, as investors were visibly reassured by the ECB's unsurprising statement.

At the close of its Governing Council meeting, the central bank cautiously laid the groundwork for the reorientation of its monetary policy and confirmed that interest rates had probably peaked.

We continue to believe that the ECB could move towards rate cuts as early as late spring, if disinflation persists and geopolitics-related supply chain disruptions do not worsen further", predict the teams at Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

The positive trend was reinforced by better-than-expected US growth figures for the fourth quarter, lending credence to the scenario of a soft landing for the US economy.

Wall Street took advantage of this to set a new series of records, with the Dow Jones gaining 0.3%, helped by the spectacular stock market recovery of IBM (+9.5%), which benefited from its encouraging results.

The day's agenda promises to be much calmer, although investors will take note in the early afternoon of the PCE price index, the Fed's preferred inflation indicator, which will enable markets to fine-tune their rate expectations.

According to the consensus, inflation in the consumer deflator sense should have risen by just 0.2% month-on-month in December.

If this were the case, it would put the inflation rate over the last three months below the Fed's target, and would have to be put on the list of indicators that could justify a rate cut in the coming months", point out analysts at Oddo BHF.

At this stage of the week, the CAC 40 index is up around 1.2% on a weekly basis, but is still down 1% since January 1.

Good news on inflation could enable the CAC to break through its resistance levels of 7480 or even 7500 points, levels which were breached in the very first trading sessions of 2024.

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