Markets fell on Friday.
The S&P 500 fell 0.8 percent, the STOXX Europe 600 fell 0.3 percent and the Nikkei 225 fell 1.0 percent.
A report on Friday showed that the preliminary consumer sentiment index for July from the University of Michigan came in at 80.8, down from 85.5 last month.
Andrew Hunter, senior US economist at Capital Economics, said that the report suggested “concerns over surging inflation”.
And while many companies have posted strong earnings results, JJ Kinahan, TD Ameritrade chief market strategist, said that “with earnings expectations so high in general, it takes a really big beat for a company to impress”.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the UK reported 51,870 new COVID-19 cases on Friday, the first time since mid-January that daily infections have risen above 50,000.
With the UK government remaining committed to plans to ease almost all pandemic restrictions, there is widespread fears that the country was heading for disaster.
“Policies that open up the country in the midst of a growing wave of infections are counterproductive in the most extreme,” warned William Haseltine, a US virologist and chair and president of ACCESS Health International.
Christina Pagel, director of the Clinical Operational Research Unit of London’s UCL, warned that there was potential for a new variant of COVID-19 to emerge this summer, and “any variant that becomes dominant in the UK will likely spread to the rest of the world”.
Infections in the US may also be following the same trajectory, with the seven-day average of new daily infections standing at 26,448, up 67 percent from a week ago.
Dr Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, warned that with so many people still unvaccinated and unwilling to wear masks, “this is just going to spread through the population”.
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