 Okay, a very good day to you. It is Sunday the 12th of December I hope you've had a fantastic weekend and a quick look ahead on what we can expect from the week and As you can see here got Corota Lagarde Powell and Andrew Bailey the governor of the Bank of England And it's a really important week It's the final kind of running now till Christmas and we get all of these central banks with their interest rate Announcements this week. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a moment But just a quick look at the charts first and then we'll talk about the weekend news then the week ahead and the one chart I really just wanted to focus on briefly was the S&P 500 in the cash market We actually finished at record high territory on Friday And of course this came irrespective of the fact that US CPI came in at its highest print in about 40 years essentially and despite then what you would imagine which would be then this idea of accelerated Tightening and therefore equities generally moving lower equities actually rallied in a relief kind of way And the reason for that really is that there was a lot of talk on the upside Particularly was Biden coming out looking to tame Expectations and managed then a high side number and the fact is it came in at 6.8% Which was actually very high but in line with expectations and so Somewhat relief and actually if we put this onto a daily chart You can see here in the futures market is the highest We've closed at this key kind of technical point of resistance that we've had around 47 11 and 3 quarters so definitely keen to see how we end on this week and do we finish as what? You know historically statistically December. It's the best trading month of the year Looking at the last I think it's 75 years worth of data So yeah, will the Santa Claus rally prevail? We'll find out really by the end of this week because then things will really start to quiet and down once this week passes But let's delve straight into the headlines first in the weekend and just briefly want to talk about the UK Omicron situation obviously it comes after the UK announced plan B coming into action Some of it as of Monday things like the work from home order But the UK Education Secretary spoke today Sunday and said one-third of new COVID infections in London are now the Omicron Variant and cases in the UK are doubling every two to three days as we know with that timeline of what Boris Johnson announced last week On Sunday, they confirmed two one thousand two hundred and thirty nine new Omicron cases and that's almost doubled From the day before we saw on Saturday UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is actually scheduled to address the nation tonight 8 p.m. London time to provide an update on the vaccine booster program Amid some of these concerns with these numbers expected to go up Of course over the case of the next few weeks We're not expecting any new form of lockdown plan C type measures to come in It's most likely just going to be an update You're probably going to be hearing from him much more Because things are going to get worse and he's going to want to try appear to be in control of the situation From an optics point of view. So he's probably going to be doing those 5 p.m. Press conferences I would have thought fairly regularly going forward now, but it's probably going to be more focused on the booster campaign Before I move on talk about the other stories in the weekend Don't forget peers and I co-founder of amplify had a chat on Friday And it was our final market maker podcast of the entire year will restart them of course in January But to give us both a bit of a break after we've we've done nearly 50 episodes Throughout the year The last one is there and we do actually talk about what is plan C What might it look at what might the conditions be that would warrant such action And economically what like that mean and ultimately for the bank of England and their decision making process Check that out. And also we both pitch a stock actually Won't go to too many details at this point in time, but out of the tech titans We both put up an argument of which ones we think out of the big boys. So alphabet amazon Delights of microsoft tesla. Who's going to actually win over the long run and quite an interesting perspective peers gives on alphabet for one Otherwise the other major stories in the weekend were us and russia foreign ministers of the g7 spoke Today sunday and they said they were united in condemnation of russia's military build-up an aggressive rhetoric Towards ukraine The us is pushing the government in berlin to stop the Nord Stream 2 Which is awaiting certification by germany in the event that russia invades ukraine According to people from newer the matter at this point in time I don't really think that the market will react to any of this It's just kind of the latest status quo I guess the main thing is is that the g7 are all Aligned at this point, but I don't think you'd expect anything other Against putin and russia on this particular issue of ukraine so Yeah, let's see where it goes from here But I wouldn't be expecting any anything too great to materialize over this week I would say and the whole idea about Using Nord Stream 2 is to kind of leverage point to control the russians I think that's nothing particularly new and i've been talking about that for a while All right. Well, let's talk about the week ahead and actually I want to jump back to the central banks. That really is the main focus Starting off with the bank of england here andrew bailey And it is no longer anticipated that they're going to hike rates when they meet later on this week on thursday Now, don't forget on thursday You've got the bank of england and the ecp literally just around 45 minutes apart from each other when it comes to the actual rate announcement And obviously they will come the day after on wednesday. We get the fed fmc outcome that evening So for the bank of england the goalposts moved a little bit obviously inflation And uscpi is coming out in the uk later on this week and it is expected to move I think to a decade high as the consensus and it's probably going to go even higher than that in future months. However Omicron is the main thing now that the uk is adopting plan b The likelihood is plan c will come in time It means now that the bank of england are likely to adopt a wait and see approach to just see how much how impactful The lockdowns are going to be in time And a lot of this came after michael saunders One of the two bank of england rate setters that voted for a rise back in november He said last week or earlier this this month There could be advantages to waiting to see how omicron affects the economy before tightening monetary policy Now the fact that you get one of your most outlying hawks makes such measured types Assessment rather than just being an outlying hawkish mindset Really seals the deal that I don't think that they can hike at this point in time So as the latest on the bank of england for the fed and a couple of things we can look at This is quite interesting graphic that really shows tapering and obviously this is the main focal point when the fed meet later on this week And that's because as we saw at the end of last week inflation at such high levels at this point in time The labor market kind of plugging away at filling the the pandemic void at this point And the tightness of the labor market what that might do for wages and so forth The fed are likely to accelerate their tapering tapering program So at the moment they're reducing that by around 15 billion in terms of the the size Of bonds that their Reduction of what they're buying every month They're likely to double down on that and take that up to 30 billion And so here you can see this line here is when they were scheduled to end You remember the actual communication from powell Was that it would be the middle of next year Basically the summer going on pace of when they would then look to wrap up the process of tapering So by doubling down We then save kind of three months and it should be march then by the time that happens now This is very much kind of expected by the markets But don't forget that in this FMC meeting is the december one So one of the four every calendar sort of quarter will get the press conference But accompanied by the new set of economic projections And the dot plots with individual interest rate projections, of course will be particularly scrutinized For where they see rates then subsequently in 2022 23 and and thereafter The other one then is the ECB And yeah, good good title here life after pep So this being the pandemic emergency purchase program the top up if you like of a large magnitude size of their asset purchase program Which was in play already post or pre the pandemic And they are set essential bank in europe to avail the parameters of future bond buying as they agree to end Those emergency purchases to pep in march as they've previously flagged a lot of the expectation has talked about basically for a short period of time Doubling the increase of the asset purchase program I think it's currently 20 up to 40 just so that they can offset then the decrease of Of the stimulus coming from the pep as they look to finish that the end of q1 so that's the kind of transition effect just to sort of Make it a more graduated Withdrawal of stimulus rather than anything too drastic particularly given the fact that mainland europe even before omicron has really hit Is already facing the delta outbreaks, which is requiring quite onus restrictions and lockdowns across the mainland at the moment And then you've got the boj finally The boj is kind of here where they're expected to decide as early as next week to scale back emergency funding deployed last year to combat The pandemic induced cash crunch according to sources on reuters And so generally following other central banks and gradually phasing out their crisis mode Policies there's one other central bank here. There are others actually that have decisions this week But the other one of interest probably is turkey That's because their local currency has been hammered of late and that's because their president Erdogan is just Insistent on the fact that they should keep cutting rates Irrespective of the fact that their inflation rate is up at the kind of 20 region at this moment in time This is a kind of brief history of last several years. In fact, the the turkish lira Although it's accelerated in terms of its sell-off more recently It certainly has been an ongoing trend and if you'd like to check out this annotated graphic You can grab it off my my twitter hand or below But essentially they're going to meet on thursday So alongside the ecb in the bank of england turkey will decide whether to halt interest rate cuts Or just go again and lower rates another time. So it's going to be particularly interesting Looking then on the rest of the week. What have we got? So going to jump to tuesday And on tuesday actually, well, excuse me wednesday here is when we get the us retail sales figures And they're expected to come in and post another decent outcome Thanks to rising incomes and wealth providing a strong underpinning For spending while industrial production also out should also grow strongly since the manufacturing surveys have all been pointing to robust activity According to analysts at i and g The other things then just to cover off On wednesday, then we get the chinese industrial production retail sales investment data numbers for november They're going to be closely watched after we saw a pretty decent trade data figures Last week from china exports actually at record levels And then you've got uk labor market data and inflation data And these are going to be two of the final metrics that we get before the bank of england and then meet on thursday And as i said The median forecast for uk cpi year and year is 4.7 percent and that would be a decade high figure And then finally on friday the final one is The flash pm is i don't think they're actually On here or here on thursday, excuse me not friday and the flash pm is a couple of things They're going to show a slight waning in sentiment according to current forecasts The surveys will fully encapsulate the numerous covid-related tightening measures implemented across the eurozone over november early december period so We are looking for a little bit of a tempering of those those numbers this time around so That is it. I wish you all a fantastic week ahead any questions at all feel free to drop me a comment Otherwise, that's it from me and i will see you tomorrow. Take care