European stocks were mixed on Monday, with investors cautiously assessing President Donald Trump’s comments over the weekend that Iran’s response to a U.S. peace proposal was “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.”
By 03:04 ET (07:04 GMT), the pan-European Stoxx 600 was mostly unchanged, while the Dax in Germany had inched up by 0.1%, the FTSE 100 in the U.K. had gained 0.4%, and the CAC 40 in France was lower by 0.5%.
According to Iranian state TV, Tehran issued a response to a U.S. plan to end their more than two-month old conflict, focusing on concluding the fighting on all fronts and demanding compensation for war damage.
Iran also stressed that it controlled the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane off the country’s southern coast through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil flows. The strait has been all but shuttered during the conflict, and is now blockaded by both the U.S. and Iran.
Writing on social media within hours after Iran appeared to make its counteroffer, Trump said that he did not “like” it. The U.S. has proposed bringing the war to a swift end, followed by more detailed negotiations on key issues, especially Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Oil prices, which have soared well above pre-war levels and fueled worries over an inflationary spike in countries around the world, marched higher. Brent crude futures, the global oil benchmark, were last higher by 3.4% at $104.69 a barrel.
Away from geopolitics, traders were also keeping tabs on an ongoing boom in artificial intelligence-related stocks, with enthusiasm around these names helping stocks in the U.S. shrug off most headwinds from the war and log fresh all-time peaks in recent days.
In individual stocks, shares of Delivery Hero rose by more than 5% after Prosus offloaded a 5% stake in the business to Hong Kong’s Aspex for 335 million euros.
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