httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7wm6oBokzg

Today we have published our ‘World First Economic Calendar’ (attached to this email). This calendar seamlessly fits into your existing Outlook calendar and details the important releases for upcoming week.) This does however not work in Outlook 2003 or on a Mac however development is going into releasing calendars in those formats. Simply open the attachment (selecting replace if you downloaded last week’s)

The fragile nature of the global recovery was shown on Friday through the volatile US Non-Farms report. The market had expected around 536k jobs to be added with the actual print at 431k and of those only 20k were new ex-census jobs. To summarise, this was pretty pants news. Stock markets sold off heavily with risky assets across all classes taking a bit of a beating. Similar moves have been seen in the Asian trading session overnight as their markets play catch up. The weekend’s news however has not been entirely supportive.

The G20 meeting took place in Busan, South Korea over the weekend with the negotiations focusing on bank reform, bank taxes and sovereign debt. The plans for a global tax on banks’ operations and profits seems to have been torpedoed although George Osborne, the UK Chancellor, seems hell bent on bringing in a tax for UK based banks. The outlook for growth however was slightly more sombre than in previous meetings as ministers dealt with increasingly bad noises coming from Hungary. This saw EUR/USD fall to a new low of 1.1877.

All in all, we are exactly where we were, economically, last week. Nothing much has changed and the trends that we have been banging on about for the past month or so are still evident. To reiterate that is for sterling gains against the euro and losses against the US dollar as risk aversion comes back into the market driven by stock market falls and fears over European debt operations.

The data calendar is bare today but we expect the day will see risky assets on the back foot as we continue to digest the poor US employment picture.