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Insight Perspectives
15
Financial Market
Update
The year of 2015 closed with significant weakness in
the oil market. The Brent oil price plunged 18% in
December, which was 35% lower than one year ago. In
December, a weak oil price also negatively impacted
the Russian ruble (minus 12.6%). Conversely, industrial
metal prices rose 4.1% in December and iron ore prices
rose 1%.
In the last month of 2015, weakness also prevailed in
the global stock market. The MSCI Developed World
index fell 1.4% (December 30), which was dragged
down by a 3.4% decline the MSCI Europe index. The
European financial market partly suffered from ECB
President Draghi’s failure to fulfil “promises” delivered
to investors in the previous months, which made the
euro bounce back sharply against the US dollar (+3.2%).
The MSCI Spain index in particular was hit hard
plunging 7.3% in December. Nonetheless, MSCI Europe
is still up 5.9% compared to one year ago, while the
MSCI USA index is up 2.2% (all in local currency).
In contrast to the developed stock market, the
Shanghai Stock Exchange Index rose 2.7% in December
as Beijing continued to launch more easing measure;
the index was up 10.3% in 2015.