Europe open: Markets subdued after brushing off impeachment
European stocks were muted on Thursday morning, as Washington's impeachment drama and rate changes in Sweden failed to have much of an impact.
At 0921 GMT, the Stoxx 600 was up by 0.1% at 414.90, as the German DAX dropped by 0.1% to 13,213.87 and France's CAC 40 rose by 0.1% to 5,963.59. Meanwhile, London's FTSE 100 inched 0.1% higher to 7,549.40.
President Trump was now facing a trial in the Senate after the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives voted to impeach him on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Markets.com analyst Neil Wilson said: "It is a sign of the times when the impeachment of the president of the United States produces nothing but a shrug. By becoming only the third president in history to be impeached, Mr Trump joins a select club. Markets simply don’t care.
"The Republican-controlled Senate will never abandon their president. Democrat speaker Nancy Pelosi has suggested she may delay sending the letters of impeachment up to the Senate, but this is posturing. The impeachment process has and remains so partisan that Mr Trump will not be removed from office."
Meanwhile, Sweden's central bank hiked its benchmark repo rate by 0.25% to zero, ending five years of negative interest rates.
Rabobank analysts said: "Given our base case is also that the US (and the globe) slips into recession next year, today’s move from the Riksbank looks likely to be viewed as a policy error further down the line (as was the case when the bank raised rates in 2010 in a move described by US economist Paul Krugman as “sado-monetarism”)."
Among individual stocks, Swiss chemicals company Clariant was in the green after it agreed to the $1.56bn sale of its Masterbatches business to US polymer provider PolyOne Corp.
Hugo Boss fell after analysts at Deutsche Bank downgraded it from 'buy' to 'hold'.
Swatch dropped after a competition watchdog in Switzerland limited the amount of component shipments that the watchmaker can send to other companies.