It’s not often we enjoy (or endure) trading sessions so high on drama from all angles, but Thursday was one such day. And for the most part the news was all positive. We had falling unemployment claims in the USA (falling by circa 9K to 336K) whilst USA GDP rose further than expected, up by […]
The ECB will leave its main refinancing rate at a record low of 0.5 percent on Thursday, according to 67 of 70 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland Group and UBS predict that the ECB will reduce borrowing costs by 25 basis points to a record low of 0.25%.
There are some announcements made and data sets that are published, that take your breath away. The fact that the Chinese economy needs to create 10 million jobs per year and must sustain growth of at least 7.2% to achieve that, is one of the more stunning pronouncements analysts and traders will witness this year.
Once the rash of European PMIs had been printed on Monday in the European morning session, lunchtime and afternoon was a relatively quiet period for high impact news events. However, the Eurozone’s ‘modest’ manufacturing recovery continues; the Eurozone’s manufacturing sector posted a rise in activity in October, despite French firms posting a weaker performance than
One of the most important weekly high impact news events, the unemployment claims in the USA, came in as the economists polled had predicted. However, the headline figure that the mainstream media led with, actually betrayed the negative information that lay just beneath the surface. Despite the claim count falling the four weekly average is
Jobless Claims in the USA Drop as California Begins To Clear Its ‘Off Grid’ Backlog Read More »
So the biggest event of the day, the week and perhaps the month came and went and the market impact was negligible; the FOMC two day meeting ended today with a whimper not a bang. And once we’d stripped away the layers of rhetoric and sophistication the sum total of all that effort over two
FOMC meeting, no change and full steam ahead with Q.E. to infinity… Read More »
If ever an illustration was needed, to reveal just how the markets and the USA economy have entered a new normal ‘twilight zone’, then perhaps Tuesday provided it. The afternoon trading session allowed us to witness the complete dislocation between policy decisions, news events, the real state of the USA economy and the inexorable bullish
Once again we’ve received disappointing data from the USA as yet another ‘bell-weather’ indicator has missed economists’ expectations and by some distance. Pending home sales in the USA have fallen by 5.6%. The previous month had seen a surprise fall of 1.5% and the expectation was for a return to growth of 0.5% positive, therefore
The department in the USA govt. apparatus responsible for the weekly unemployment claims number, appears to have got ahead of the curve regarding the missing prints from Nevada and California. Thursday’s weekly unemployment claims print came in at 350,000 down 12,000 from the revised figure of 362,000 the previous week. The 4-week moving average was
There was good news regarding the Eurozone and the EA on Wednesday, an official consumer confidence index published by the European Commission showed an improvement. Now despite it coming in at -14.5 that’s actually close to the longer term average of -14 for the Euro Area. Moreover the reading in the E.U. is actually ahead
