United States

It’s CPI week in the US and Europe. Inflationary numbers will provide an interesting dilemma. The RBA airs its thoughts today in a quiet week for Aussie data.

Wall Street gyrated wildly on Friday, ending virtually unchanged as the Fed and ECB stepped up their liquidity injections.

Last night the ECB made a startling move by injecting E95bn into the banking system as BNP Paribas froze three hedge funds through lack of liquidity. The Dow fell 387 points.

The Dow rose 153 points last night, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing.

Weekly musings from your editor. This week he shares some thoughts about a meeting with two experts out of the FNArena database of readers.

A slowing economy on the back of the sub-prime crisis means the US no longer leads the world in base metal consumption, but an expected pick-up in coming months keeps Barclays positive on the sector.

As the US deals with a credit crunch, it would not be a good time for China to start dumping US Treasuries. But it is threatening to do so if the protectionist groundswell is not addressed.

It was a case of bad news can be good news on Wall Street as the Fed decided not to ease rates in the face of the credit crunch. The Dow pulled back losses to be up 35 points.

I was the biggest up-tick since October 2002, but traders remained unconvinced of the integrity of last night’s rally. Oil finally tipped over.

Weak jobs data set the market off again as a US mortgage lender went under and Bear Stearns fuelled the pessimism.