Danske Daily

Led by financials and homebuilders, the US stock indices managed to close the second to last trading day in 2011 with around 1% gains. Gains were continued in the Asian trading, with Asian equity indices trading up around half a percent at the time of writing. The US Treasury yields were little changed on Thursday’s trading.

After falling towards the 1.2850 level on Thursday’s European trading session (the lowest level in over a year’s time), EUR/USD has clawed back some of the losses and is trading back above the 1.29 mark in thin market conditions.

US economic data once again delivered a string of mildly positive surprises
yesterday with the 4-week jobless claims falling to 375K persons, or the lowest level since mid – 2008, extending a general path of declining jobless claims.Further bolstering the mildly positive sentiment in Thursday’s US session, Chicago PMI remained near the previously elevated level with an index reading of 62.5 for December, beating consensus expectation, as did the November pending home sales.

In the Asian session, the December HSBC PMI numbers for China were released at an index reading of 48.7, close to the flash reading of 49 that was released on 15 December. While improving from the 47.7 reading for November, the Chinese manufacturing indicator remains below the key growth threshold of 50 for a second consecutive month and is fuelling speculation of further reserve rate requirements cuts in the near-term future.

Global Daily

The final trading day of 2011 will feature a rather light data offering. In Europe, December house prices from the UK and preliminary December headline inflation numbers from Spain are on the tab. Consensus expectation for the CPI in Spain is for price growth to have decelerated further in the final month of the year to 2.5% y/y, from 2.9% y/y in November.

In the emerging markets, Turkish November trade balance numbers, Polish central bank’s December inflation surveys and Q3 current account data, as well as Latvian November retail trade figures will cap 2011 data releases.

In Scandinavia, the single final calendar release of the year is the October non-manual workers’ wage data.