Mind The Gap

With a cost of living crisis evident in the UK it wasn’t completely unexpected that the UK’s retail figures might slip, we mentioned as much in our morning roll call section. Many retailers are suggesting anecdotally that their customers are “keeping their hands in their pockets” month to month, payday to payday and with Xmas […]

The UK’s ONS has published its latest unemployment number and on face value the numbers look good and are adding fuel to the belief that, once a level of unemployment of 7% is reached, the BoE governor Mark Carney may have the ‘green light’ to increase the UK’s base interest rate above the 0.5% where

After the ECB’s base rate cut of 0.25% last week many analysts, including yours truly, believed that the ECB wouldn’t stop there and would pile on the rhetoric and deliver threatening narrative of more interest rate cuts in order to weaken the euro, which the ECB regard as too high and potentially damaging for export

In a relatively quiet news day, due to the USA and Canada markets being closed for a bank holiday, the Greek parliament no confidence vote ended in a damp squib for the party that brought the motion. Japan’s current account balance was boosted massively by its export business smashing analysts’ expectations by some considerable margin.

The USA non farm payroll (NFP) print will take centre stage in terms of high impact news events this afternoon. The expectation is for a print of circa 121K for the month of October. Various talking heads in the mainstream financial press will look to place the ‘blame’ for the poor print (if it does

The major high impact news events and policy decisions in today’s trading sessions concern the interest rate setting in the UK and by the ECB for Europe. Both rates expected to remain static at 0.5%. The notes and speeches accompanying each rate setting decision will be more eagerly awaited than the decisions, given the potential

The eurozone private sector maintained its fragile and modest economic recovery at the start of the final quarter of 2013. October PMI data from Markit signalled that business activity in the currency union expanded for the fourth successive month. Although a slight dip in the final Markit Eurozone PMI Composite Output Index to 51.9 in

In its meeting in the overnight/early morning trading session Australia’s central bank, the RBA, decided to once again leave its base interest rate at 2.5%. A leading UK think tank, the NIESR,  has suggested that the UK’s growth is far too dependent on squeezing its consumers for improvement. The troika re-visits Greece (starting today) to

The PMIs published for various member states of the Eurozone (and the EZ itself) have been published in the morning European trading session and the numbers point towards a sustained, but slow recovery in the Eurozone area. Spain’s manufacturing PMI came in at 50.9, up from 50.7, whilst Italy’s came in at 50.7 down from

A raft of PMIs, published courtesy of Markit economics, has come in mainly positive in the overnight and early morning European sessions. The UK’s was slightly below expectation, but still above the minimum term trend. Whilst China’s reached an 18 month high. In other news the UK banking sector has fallen this week and RBS