By Greg Peel<\/p>\n
Welcome to your abbreviated holiday weekend report.<\/p>\n
The Dow finished down 17 points or 0.1% on Friday as books were squared for the end of the quarter. The S&P and Nasdaq fell 0.3% each.<\/p>\n
Economic data released on Friday were positive in terms of indicating a still relatively healthy economy. August consumer spending rose 0.6% to be the fastest growth in two years. Michigan University found consumer sentiment remained steady in September. August construction spending surprisingly rose 0.2% while the Chicago PMI also surprised with an increase.<\/p>\n
The August consumer spending number implied year-on-year inflation of 1.8%, which is the lowest level since 2004. Thus while the data reduced hopes of a further rate cut in October the inflation number leaves plenty of room to ease again at some point.<\/p>\n
Corporate asset-backed paper issues fell 17% for the week suggesting that while credit activity has returned in prime securities there remains reluctance at the riskier end.<\/p>\n
The low inflation number forced the US dollar down yet lower against the euro to another record of 1.4274 and sent gold soaring again – by US$9.30 to US$743.10\/oz. Gold’s rise came despite some profit taking in oil which fell US$1.22 to US$81.66\/bbl. The Aussie pushed onward to US$0.8879 which I think might exceed the pre-crunch high.<\/p>\n
Base metals were slightly lower, with profit-taking in lead and nickel causing stand-out 4% falls.<\/p>\n
The SPI Overnight was up 19 points.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Dow closed off the quarter with a small down day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[23,21,29,24,22,26],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53492"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}