French Business Confidence Rises

French business confidence rose to the highest in 15 months in July, indicating that improving demand is helping to support an economy that’s stagnated for the past two years.
Sentiment among industrial executives increased to 95 in from 93 in June, national statistics office Insee in Paris said today. That’s above the reading of 94 that was the median forecast of 21 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. A broader index including the services, wholesale and construction industries climbed to 87 from 86.

The improvement suggests the euro area’s second-largest economy may be starting to stabilize after it slipped back into a recession this year. With the indexes below their long-term average, the recovery that President Francois Hollande trumpeted in his Bastille Day address last week remains elusive.

via Bloomberg

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza