Morning Roll Call

The ECB cut interest rates to 0.25% last week and kept the deposit rate at zero. The euro came under pressure on Wednesday after an ECB board member, Peter Praet, hinted the central bank could authorise negative interest rates, or buying assets from banks in the form of quantitative easing, in order to hit its […]

The UK’s inflation figures were the surprise statistic of the day on Tuesday, and coming in below expectation caused a quick calculation (by many in the analyst community) that the BoE MPC would not be raising interest rates any time soon, causing an immediate sell off in Sterling. Moreover the news was recognised as ‘good’

Britain’s inflation rate could drop to a six-month low when the monthly measure of the cost of living is released this morning. Many analysts are predicting that the UK’s Consumer Prices Index will drop to 2.5% in October, down from 2.7% in September. This is close to the Bank of England’s 2% target, but still

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

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

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