Morning Roll Call

Shares in New York fell sharply on Thursday afternoon after the US Treasury warned that the budget impasse between the Republicans and Democrats in Washington risked plunging the world’s biggest economy into its worst slump since the Great Depression; [quote]“A default would be unprecedented and has the potential to be catastrophic. Credit markets could freeze, […]

On Tuesday market investors appeared to brush off the partial shut down of the USA government; equities rallied in Europe and the USA, whilst the Nikkei and the ASX 200 rose. However, Wednesday was an entirely different scenario; the USA markets fell sharply shortly after the market opened to recover some losses towards the end

The trading day on Tuesday began with investors fearing the worst due to the USA partial government shutdown, however, once the New York open began to approach it had become obvious, through European markets early performance and the USA equity future index futures, that investors fears were overdone… Analysts at IHS have calculated that at

  It would appear that the USA government is inching towards a shut-down, the ‘saving grace’ is that the leading credit agency, Standard & Poor’s, is signaling that it isn’t concerned enough to downgrade the USA government credit status by another notch. In a research note delivered to the financial industry, S&P lowered the probability

The USA weekly unemployment claims came in at 309K on Thursday, an improvement on the predicted 319K from the analysts polled, however, rather disappointedly these figures still cannot be trusted as certain states’ data still appears to be in a mess. The final GDP figure for USA GDP growth came in at 0.6% for the

Treasury secretary Jacob Lew stated on Wednesday evening that the USA government will have finally exhausted its borrowing authority by 17 October, leaving the United States just $30bn cash on hand to pay its bills. The government officially reached its $16.7tn debt limit in May. Since which time it’s been using “extraordinary measures”, such as

We highlighted the high impact news events for Tuesday in our ‘Mind The Gap’ section, that could affect sentiment in the afternoon session. The Richmond Fed Manufacturing survey came in below economists expectations; the Fifth District manufacturing activity was little changed in September, according to the most recent survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of

In our weekly trends publication, published on Monday morning every trading week in our Trader’s Corner blog, we mentioned the importance of the rash of PMIs that were published this Monday. The European PMIs for manufacturing and services were, for the most part, positive. However, the USA print provided a mild shock as the PMI

We’re not sure if our readers have noticed but there’s always an excuse prepared for failing economic information. The weather is the favourite excuse, particularly were retail data is concerned. If retail sales figures are up it’ll be the sun shining, down and it’s the rain, snow or gales, or the heat wave which has

The word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, as an attempt to explain the way cultural information spreads. Internet memes are a subset of this general meme concept specific to the culture and environment of the Internet. In 2013 Dawkins characterized an Internet meme as being a meme