BOE

FCX announced today that its Board has suspended its annual common stock dividend of $0.20 per share. This action will provide cash savings of approximately $240 million per annum and further enhance FCX’s liquidity during this period of weak market conditions. FCX’s Board will review its financial policy on an ongoing basis and authorize cash returns to shareholders as market conditions improve.

In a recent survey not a single major central bank could provide an example of an accurate “a priori” recession forecast. The silence from the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, BOE, BOJ and the Bank of Canada is deafening.

PREVIEW: BoE December Rate Decision & Minutes Release 1200GMT/0600CST

• All surveyed analysts expect the Bank of England to keep monetary policy unchanged, with the bank rate at 0.5% and the Asset Purchase Facility at GBP 375bln

• Headline UK CPI printed at -0.1% for October, still well below the BoE’s mandated 2% target

· Central bank rate decisions take focus this week, with the Bank of England, Swiss National Bank, Reserve Bank of New Zealand Central Bank of Russia all set to announce their latest decision on interest rates

After a week full of macroeconomic and headline news (and blooper) fireworks, it’s a fairly quiet start to the week today, with the usual post-payrolls lull in the US.

With Draghi's Friday comments, which as we noted previously were meant solely to push markets higher, taking place after both Europe and Asia closed for the week, today has been a session of catch up for both Asian and Europe, with Japan and China up 1% and 0.3% respectively, and Europe surging 1.4%, pushing government bond yields lower as the dollar resumes its climb on expectations that Draghi will jawbone the European currency lower once more, which in turn forced Goldman to announce two hours ago that it is "scaling back our expectation for Euro downside."

"Not really... well, of course."

As a consequence, on the back of the rate decision and press conference, EUR/USD soared after touching intra month lows in the build up and falling below the 1.0550 level to then break above 1.0900 and sustaining the strength through to the end of the week.

Overnight, Credit Suisse became the latest bank to join Goldman, JPM and increasingly more banks in predicting that 2016 will be a year in which investors will want to rotate out of equities. Specifically, the second largest Swiss bank said that it is "we reduce our equity weightings to our most cautious strategic stance since 2008 and take our mid-2016 S&P 500 target down to 2,150, the same as our end-2016 target." Here are the five reasons why CS just looked at the mounting wall of worry... and began to worry.

There was something for everyone in last night's much anticipated Chinese PMI data, with the official number sliding to the lowest in over 3 years, suggesting the PBOC will need to do more stimulus and is thus bullish, while the unoffocial Caixin print rising to the highest since June, suggesting whatever the PBOC is doing is working, and is also bullish. Not unexpectedly, global stocks decided to take the bullish way out, and have risen across the globe led by Asia, where stocks rose as much as 1.8%, Europe also green and US equity futures up 10 points as of this writing.

Without a rerun of last Friday's Chinese stock market rout, European traders could focus on what "really matters", namely how much of the ECB's upcoming 20 bps rate cut and €20 billion QE expansion (with Commerzbank saying Draghi may even hint at Europe's QE3) is priced in, and whether the ECB's actions are just modestly priced in, or more than fully, and just how big the "sell the news" event will be.The result: the Euro falls to a new 7 month low, the dollar spot index hits a new all time high, and European stocks and US futures stage another remarkable overnight comeback on the usual low volume levitation and central bank intervention.

After several months of artificial, centrally-planned calm in Chinese markets, where "malicious sellers" found out the hard way the Politburo means business, overnight the relative quiet in Chinese stocks since August broke with a bang when the Shanghai Composite tumbled as much 6.1% before closing down 5.5%, the biggest drop in three months and the largest weekly loss since the depth of the Chinese rout in mid-August while a gauge of Chinese volatility surged from the lowest level since March.

Following yesterday's dramatic geopolitical shock, U.S. equity index futures rise as Russia has not escalated the confrontation with Turkey as some had feared, while Asian shares fall, reversing earlier gains. European stocks are rallying and the euro is falling on the back of a Reuters report that the ECB is mulling new measures to prop up lending, although it’s not clear at this point what the real impact from these measures would be.

It had been a relatively quiet session overnight when as reported previously, the geopolitical situation in the middle east changed dramatically in a moment, when NATO-member country Turkey downed a Russian fighter jet allegedly over Turkish territory even though the plane crashed in Syria, and whose pilots may have been captured by local rebel forces. The news promptly slammed Turkish assets and FX, sending the Lira tumbling, pushing lower European stocks and US equity futures while sending 2 Year German Bunds to record negative yields.

As a result of the global commodity weakness, global stocks have fallen for the first time in six days as the sell-off in commodities continued, dragging both US equity futures and European stocks lower. However, putting this in context, last week the MSCI All Country World Index posted its biggest weekly gain in six weeks: alas, without a coincident rebound in commodity prices, it will be merely the latest dead cat bounce.