Sterling - Dollar Spread Betting Market Rebounds Despite Weak UK Unemployment
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The regular Financial Markets Update from Simon Denham of Financial Spreads.
For today's update >> Financial Markets.
Spread Betting 17 November 2011
Getting a job nowadays is by no means easy, particularly for those just out of university.
With firms struggling to see any bright prospects ahead they are reluctant to take on new staff. Those firms that are looking to expand, which are certainly in the minority, are usually looking for specialised staff or those with specific experience.
This is sidelining the graduates who can be more of a risk to take on as they need training to do the job. This is the crunch factor and during such delicate times it is not a risk that employers are willing to take.
The outlook doesn’t look any better either with the Bank of England, as expected, cutting their growth forecasts. They also highlighted that with the continuing turmoil on the continent there’s little to suggest there’ll be any surprises to the upside.
With business confidence heading south there’s not going to be many willing employers out there for sometime until confidence returns. At the moment that lack of confidence stems primarily from the Eurozone, our biggest trading partner.
This means that things could very possibly get worse before they get any better. Job losses are hitting the City particularly hard, with banks trimming their workforces aggressively.
HSBC, Lloyds and Bank of America are getting rid of between 10 and 15% of their workforce. That’s a vast amount of people and is on top of job cuts from the past few years as well.
As expected, we saw the usual claims from opposition politicians that it’s all down to the government cuts, which once again shows how politicians will do anything to grab a headline and a vote.
The government cuts are not as deep as they could, or maybe even should, be. For all those unfortunate young people without a job, you can’t expect the government to turn around and employ them under the state. That would require the borrowing of another few billion and would push our ever deteriorating deficit into even more unsustainable levels.
There’s no easy answer, but this government can certainly do more to make it easier to employ people and get the economy moving again. Unfortunately, however, we also need our friends across the Channel to pick up too.
We wait with bated breath to see what our young Chancellor has to say in his autumn statement at the end of this month.
The FTSE continues to hover around 5500 but just below it this morning. Gains continue to remain hard to come by for the index and the lack of direction is worrying.
The year-end rally has certainly not kicked off yet, if it comes at all this year, but the only thing that will do it will be a clear solution to containing the sovereign debt crisis.
The poor unemployment figures and Mervyn King’s Inflation Report didn’t bode well for the pound yesterday. However, this morning FX spread betting investors are moving out of the dollar, on the back of speculation that the Fed Reserve Bank of New York President’s speech today will suggest that quantitative easing could be back on the cards.
So, the sterling – dollar spread betting market has been given a bit of a boost this morning and is trading up marginally against the dollar at $1.5742. The pair has support at $1.5680 and resistance at $1.5825.
Fighting against the strengthening dollar, gold found it hard to make ground yesterday. Not only this but a US Labour Department report saw a 0.1% decline in consumer prices against September’s figure, which accentuated the fact that gold was a needless hedge against inflation, thus reducing the demand for the yellow metal.
There was an interesting media report in yesterday’s session though. Jon Paulson, one of the larger holders of gold ETF’s, has just dumped a third of his stack, worth around $2 billion.
So by the close of business, the precious metal had slumped $17 dollars to $1763.3 and, at the time of writing, gold is pretty much flat at $1764.7.
The announcement that the Seaway pipeline will be reversed brought great optimism to the energy sector yesterday. Investors piled into the crude oil spread betting market, as its thought that congestion formed at the Cushing, Oklahoma hub, will now be eased.
So for the first time in several months, the gap between the WTI and Brent contracts moved down into single digits. Currently Brent on the January future trades at $111.78.
The above comments do not constitute investment advice and neither Financial Spreads nor Clean Financial accept any responsibility for any use that may be made of them.
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'Sterling - Dollar Spread Betting Market Rebounds Despite Weak UK Unemployment' edited by SD, updated 17-Nov-11
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