This week  has seen all major stock markets rise and in particluar the Chinese Hang Seng roase by 12%.

All European and American markets rose too with the highest rise shown by the French CAC 40 having risen on the week by 6.7% as confidence starts to feed back in to economies around the globe.

Also, with confidence coming back the oil price has risen in the week by 11.5% to $58.71 per barrel.
End of the week saw:

Global stock markets are continuing to fall as investors worry about how deep the downturn is going to be.

Calling the bottom of the market is a tricky job

The Nikkei in Tokyo is at its lowest level since October 1982 and stock markets seem to be falling throughout the world.

Every so often, there is a day of gains, but these have tended to be wiped out later in the week.

This comes despite trillions of pounds being pledged worldwide to secure the future of the banking system.

Has something new happened to spark the latest falls?

It is hard to point to specific events, but the falls seem to have been linked to attempts to solve the problems not reaping immediate rewards.

The Group of Seven (G7) issued a statement effectively threatening to intervene to weaken the yen, but the yen kept on rising against the dollar.

The Japanese government promised further steps to support share prices, but the shares carried on falling.

Meanwhile, governments around the world have pledged eye-watering amounts of money to get banks lending to each other, but they are still not doing so.

“Every week credit markets remain dysfunctional is doing unknown damage to the macro economy,” said Thomas Lee at JPMorgan.

With the prospect of an approaching global recession, any bad news is knocking several percentage points off stock markets.

What happened to the cheer from the bank rescue packages?

There were indeed big gains on stock markets a few weeks ago as countries seemed to be prepared to work together to solve the banking problems that were at the heart of the credit crunch.

The problem is that despite the rescue, there is a widespread belief that many of the world’s biggest economies are going into recession.

The oil price has fallen, with Brent crude dropping below $60 a barrel, because it is thought that as economies slow there will be less oil used. The same argument goes for copper or coal.

That means that there is likely to be less demand for the products of the big global commodities companies that are particularly well represented on the FTSE 100.

What is going on with currencies at the moment?

There have been wild fluctuations on the currency markets too, with the G7 expressing concern about the volatility of the yen.

Also, the Australian central bank has taken the unusual step of intervening to support its currency twice in a few days.

But it really is the yen that is grabbing the headlines, hitting 13-year peaks against the US dollar and a six-year high against the euro.

The yen has been strengthening as a result of the end of the carry trade, in which traders borrowed the Japanese currency and used it to buy currencies with higher interest rates.

As the difference between Japanese rates and those elsewhere in the world has fallen, traders have been unwinding the carry trade, which means they have been using other currencies to buy yen, which has boosted the Japanese currency.

The strong yen is a particular problem for Japanese exporters, which see their products becoming more expensive for customers overseas, who are already being hit by their own national downturns.

How much further down can the markets go?

Spotting when markets have reached the bottom is a tricky and risky process.

Many traders believe in the idea of capitulation, which broadly means a market surrender.

This is when investors are prepared to get out of the market at any price because they have given up all hope of making money from their shares.

It is often marked by panic-selling and very high volumes of transactions.

The idea is that after capitulation you reach a point at which the last investor who is desperate to get out of shares and move into supposedly less risky assets has sold out.

Once there is a widespread belief that the bottom has been reached, bargain-hunters pile in and the market recovers.

Have we reached the bottom of the market then?

It is really difficult to say.

Some people think we’re nearly there.

The trouble is, some people reckoned we’d reached that point last month.

There were those who declared capitulation had been reached on 15 September when the Dow Jones index fell 504 points in a day.

But since then it has fallen another 2,500 points.

Capitulation is easy to spot in retrospect but the people who recognise it accurately at the time can get very, very rich.

News reported by The BBC

Global stock markets have been hit again with major indexes in the US, Europe and Asia closing the day down, after a session of volatile trading.

On Wall Street, the main Dow Jones index fell 2.42%, despite being boosted earlier in the day by a surprise rise in new home sales in September.

The FTSE in London and Cac in Paris closed behind, with European indexes touching five year lows during the day.

Prior to that, Japan’s Nikkei index had ended at a 26-year low.

The Dow Jones was down 203 points to 8,175.77. The broader S&P 500 closed down 3.18% at 844.95, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq was down 2.97% at 1505.90.

At close the FTSE in London closed down 0.79%, or 30.77 points, at 3,852.59.

In Paris the Cac was down 3.96%, or 126 points, at 3067.35, although the Dax in Frankfurt was up 0.91% at 4,334.64, shares in Volkswagen soared 146%.

Earlier the FTSE had fallen 5.6% to 3,665 points – its lowest level since April 2003.

The pound also continued its recent falls, dropping against the dollar to $1.5341 in early trading before recovering slightly to $1.5591.

The euro was also lower, sliding to $1.2377, around levels last seen in April 2006, before coming back to $1.2548.

“There’s lots of volatility, not just in the equity market, but in the interest rate and currency markets too,” said Neil Parker, market strategist at Royal Bank of Scotland.

“We’re going to get further big swings as the markets watch for what the authorities are going to do.”

“There is more pain left. The global turmoil does not appear to be resolving soon” Atul Mehra, J M Financial Asian impact

Japan’s Nikkei 225 index ended down 6.4% at its lowest level since 1982.

On the currency markets, Japan’s yen stayed near its 13-year high against the US dollar, despite threats of G7 intervention.

In other market news:

– Oil prices fell to 17-month lows. US light crude was down $1.77 at $62.38 a barrel. Brent was $1.75 lower at $60.30.
– India’s Sensex index dropped 6.1% to its lowest level since November 2005 before closing down 2.2%
– The Seoul market reversed early losses to close up 0.8% after South Korea’s central bank cut its key interest rate from 5% to 4.25% at a rare, unscheduled meeting
– In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng closed down 12.7% in its biggest single-day fall since 1991
– Chinese shares also fell, with the Shanghai Composite Index losing 6.3% to its lowest level since September 2006
– In the Philippines, the main index fell 12.3%, as the country’s second biggest bank Banco de Oro Unibank reported a loss of 1.3bn pesos ($26.8m; £16.8m) because of its exposure to the US investment bank Lehman Brothers
– European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet says another cut in eurozone interest rates is “possible”
– Argentine stocks fell more than 5%, closing at their lowest level in more than five years

“There is more pain left. The global turmoil does not appear to be resolving soon,” said Atul Mehra at the brokerage J M Financial in Mumbai.

Yen warning

Earlier on Monday the Group of Seven (G7) industrialised nations issued a statement warning that the strength of the yen was a threat to economic stability, which was taken as a threat of co-ordinated action to reduce the value of the currency.

While the yen briefly weakened, it soon climbed back towards Friday’s 13-year high against the dollar.

The yen has been strengthening as a result of the end of the carry trade, in which traders borrowed the Japanese currency and used it to buy currencies with higher interest rates.

“Brown’s solution to the current global problem is likely to lead to net gains” Tom, UK

Send us your commentsAs the difference between Japanese rates and those elsewhere in the world has fallen, traders have been ending the carry trade, which means they have been using other currencies to buy yen, which has boosted the Japanese currency.

In other currency news, the Australian government intervened for a second time to support its currency, which was trading at a 5-year low against the US dollar. One US dollar was worth 1.64 Australian dollars.

The Australian central bank last intervened more than a year ago and before that had not done so since 2001.

News reported by The BBC

Global stocks have fallen sharply on one of the worst days of trading in 30 years, despite continuing government efforts to tackle the crisis.

The UK’s main FTSE 100 index ended down almost 9% before a meeting of the finance ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) most-developed nations.

In a day of major panic selling, the Dow Jones index fell as much as 5% in the US before ending down 1.5%.

The fear is that the financial crisis will tip the world into a recession.

France’s Cac index closed down 7.7%, while Germany’s Dax lost 8.4% in a day of heavy selling.

In other major developments:

– The British pound tumbled to a five-year low against the US dollar to trade at $1.6902 at one point, but recovered later. It also fell against the euro to 1.245 euros
– Tokyo’s shares plunged 24% during the week, double their weekly fall during the 1987 market crash
– Oil prices fell to a one-year low, with US light crude dropping to $77.99. Back in July it hit a record high of $147.27
– The three-month rate at which banks lend dollars to each other – known as Libor – rose to 4.8%
– Moscow and Jakarta stock markets remain suspended because of excessive volatility
– The Vienna stock market fell 10% on re-opening after trading was suspended on Friday morning
Crisis meetings

Investors increasingly fear a global recession, despite interest rate cuts and cash injections by central banks.

“The underlying illness remains in the system – as manifested in the record amounts banks were charging each other yesterday for lending to each other” Robert Peston BBC Business Editor

President Bush said the White House was acting to resolve the crisis and restore stability to the markets.

“We are a prosperous nation with immense resources and a wide range of tools at our disposal,” he said.

After meeting in Washington, G7 finance ministers said they would take “decisive action and use all available tools” to tackle the world economic crisis.

Their talks come ahead of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, also in US capital, on Saturday and Sunday.

‘Fear’

Wall Street’s Dow Jones ended down 128 points to 8,451.

“Fear has been running all over Wall Street,” said Dave Henderson, a floor trader on the New York Stock Exchange.

“I think the carcass has been stripped to the bone.”

The FTSE closed down 381.7 points lower at 3,932, wiping £91.2bn off the value of the largest UK shares.

The index has fallen 21% this week – the second-biggest weekly fall in FTSE 100 history.

The largest single day fall on the FTSE 100 was on Tuesday, 20 October 1987, when the index lost 12.22%.

This was a day after the so-called Black Monday global stocks crash, when the FTSE 100 declined 10.84%.

For that week as a whole the FTSE 100 declined 28.23%.

In Paris, the Cac 40 index finished down 266 points to 3,176.5, while the Frankfurt-based Dax closed 343 points lower at 4,533.7.

Earlier there were heavy falls across Asia’s markets as a climate of fear took hold.

In Japan, the Nikkei index slumped in its biggest one-day drop since the 1987 stock market crash.

News reported by The BBC

Fears about a global economic slowdown, heightened by worsening US job figures, have continued to undermine stock markets around the world.

The Dow Jones index was down a further 100 points, 1%, after figures showed the US economy shed 84,000 jobs last month. It had fallen by 3% on Thursday.

Meanwhile London’s FTSE 100 index lost 2.3% – taking its weekly decline to 7% – its biggest since July 2002.

Markets in Paris and Frankfurt fell by 2.5% as economy concerns spread.

Earlier, Japan’s main share index fell nearly 3% while markets in Hong Kong, China, Australia and India all slid 2%.

‘Ugly’ data

The US labour market figures – which showed the unemployment rate rising to 6.1% – were a further jolt to investors who have had to swallow a slew of poor economic data in recent days.

Economists had been expecting 75,000 jobs to be lost while the government also revised upwards.

“This was an ugly number that pretty much confirms that our economy continues to trend downward,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer of Harris Private Bank.

“This just knocks the legs out of any hope of seeing much economic improvement right now.”

‘Uncertainty’

“Amid the uncertainty, few investors are willing to buy” Masayuki Otani, Securities Japan

The FTSE 100 closed down 2.3% at 5,240.70 points. The last time it lost so much value in a week was more than six years ago in the wake of financial scandals such as Enron and WorldCom.

Markets in Paris and Frankfurt continued their recent downward trend, both the Cac-40 index and the Dax-30 dropping about 2.5%.

Earlier Japan’s benchmark Nikkei index fell 361.54 points to 12,196.12 amid a widespread sell-off of shares in Asia.

The Hang Seng index fell more than 3% in Hong Kong while markets also fell sharply in China, Australia and India.

“Amid the uncertainty, few investors are willing to buy,” said Masayuki, Otani, chief market analyst at Securities Japan.

“Several bad things happened at once,” he added, explaining the fall.

Gloom

Worries about inflation have prevented central banks in Europe from cutting interest rates to help forestall a slowdown.

But analysts believe this could change soon with economic forecasts across Europe looking increasingly gloomy.

The European Central Bank cut its 2009 growth forecast from 1.5% to 1.2% on Thursday while the UK economy stalled in the second quarter.

In a separate development, the Russian rouble fell against the dollar a day after Russia’s central bank intervened to support the currency amid concerns about a flight of foreign capital after the conflict with Georgia.

The central bank sold up to $4bn in reserves, the Financial Times reported, after the rouble slipped to its lowest level since February 2007.

News reported by The BBC