httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM5OdTwPbok

• Deal signed on Thursday night helps in Friday markets.
• Euro moves away from 10 month lows
• All opinion polls put Conservatives in lead for election.
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All this and more is available on our blog. Click here  http://www.worldfirst.com/blog

Friday was the first opportunity for European markets to act upon the news that a bailout for Greece had been put together.

Equity markets moved upwards and speculators lifted the euro off its recent 10 month lows against the US dollar while the gains the pound made from Thursday’s strong retail sales data were also wiped out.

As we were keen to point out on Friday this is not the be all and end all for Greece and now we must look at the overall cost of fiscal responsibility. So far the numbers that have been talked about are fairly small in the grand scheme of things; the kindness shown to the euro on Friday will be tested by a Greek debt issue this week. Should the take-up be less than the most recent pre-bailout issuance the euro will get smacked.

It wouldn’t be Monday if we didn’t talk about opinion polls and the general election. Three opinion polls were published yesterday and all put the Conservative party in the lead by anywhere between 5 and 8 points; still in hung parliament territory. This does not look to have affected the pound too much this morning although the election still remains the major concern going forward.

Tonight there is a live debate on Channel 4 between Darling, Osborne and Cable on the economic problems facing the UK and what they see as the solutions. Should Osborne come out of this badly (he will be targeted, particularly by Labour) then we would expect GBP to have a bad Tuesday morning as we lead into the GDP figure. The debate is at 8pm.

We open up a fairly busy week with a fairly quiet Monday. We have UK mortgage approvals at 09.30 followed by EU consumer confidence at 10.00 and US inflation at 13.30.