Here's my summary of the key news overnight in 90 seconds at 9 am, including news American employers hired more workers than forecast in October while an influx of people joining the labor force pushed their unemployment rate higher, according to the last job market report before the presidential election. That election is Wednesday, New Zealand time.
In China, following the encouraging manufacturing data out last week, non-manufacturing industries rebounded from the slowest expansion in at least 19 months, adding to those manufacturing gains and indicating the world’s second-biggest economy is recovering from a seven-quarter slowdown.
In Europe, the ECB is checking whether it may have contravened its own strict rules by lending to Spanish banks on overly generous terms, an ECB spokeswoman said yesterday. The rating of some securities should have made them completely ineligible as collateral for the ECB, a newspaper's investigation showed. The Germans are livid.
In Australia, their government is expected to expand their GST net to catch AU$4.2 billion in online sales, in a bid to shore up collapsing federal tax revenues. Harvey Norman and other local retailers have been pushing for this, but it is the slowing economy there that is hurting their tax base.
This comes after it was revealed that their mining tax has collected zero in its first three months rather than the billions expected, another signal that all is not well across the ditch.
Commodity prices fell sharply at the end of last week, with oil down 2.6%, silver down 4.3% and gold off US$40 per ounce or 2.3% for the week to US$1,680/oz, declining to a level it was at more than a year ago.
The NZ$ starts this week at US$0.825 and the TWI is at 74. These are high levels but generally we have been at these levels for the past four months, and remember these are the same levels we were at between February and April this year; these levels were also around for the four months last year between June and September.
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