It’s been quite a lively trading session so far today as we have had quite a lot of news to digest from around the world. Let’s start in Europe first of all because this is where we have had the majority of the economic data so far.

It was announced earlier that house prices in the UK rose by 0.9% in June which was a big positive announcement but this was negated by the news that the UK economy had contracted by 2.4% in the first quarter of 2009 (0.4% worse than expected).

Elsewhere there were better than expected unemployment figures coming out of Germany and across the whole of Europe the CPI was slightly better than expected at -0.1%.

In the US the Chicago PMI figure came in marginally better than expected at 39.9 whilst consumer confidence was 5.5 points down on the previous month at 49.3.

As a result of all this the major stock markets have fallen into negative territory, mainly as a result of the US data.

The FTSE 100, CAC 40 and DAX are currently down 1.16%, 1.87% and 1.67% at 4244, 3144 and 4801 respectively whilst the Dow Jones, S&P 500 and Nasdaq are down 1.20%, 1.22% and 0.60% at 8428, 917 and 1833 respectively.

On the currency markets the GBP/USD and EUR/USD pairs were both trading higher earlier but have fallen back quite sharply in recent hours and now trade at 1.6441 and 1.4015 respectively. The USD/JPY has moved in the opposite direction and is now as high as 96.41.

Finally on the commodity markets the price of oil is down just over $2 today at $69.29 whilst the price of gold is down $12 to $929.

 

 

Filed under: Market News

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