Global equity markets have had a volatile start to the week thanks to speculation that the Fed will speed up the pace of its QE tapering

Although we have had a busy start to the week in terms of economic data, equity markets have been relatively subdued.

After the explosions and excitement of bonfire night festivities over the weekend, markets have come up for air this week, and have broadly been flat.

In what has been a positive start to the week for markets, data releases have been somewhat muted.

The BoE has stolen the show this week following comments over the weekend by Andrew Bailey.

Over the weekend Michael Saunders, a BoE policymaker, said that financial markets were right to bring forward expectations on UK interest rate increases.

We had hoped that OPEC would announce a further increase in their output quotas following their October meeting to help satisfy the recovering demand, but unfortunately the cartel simply stated that it would stick to its previously announced increase of 400,000 barrels a day from November.

It hasn’t been a great start to the week for equity markets as Europe’s gas and China’s electricity shortages continue to push energy prices higher

It has been a frustrating start to the week as equity markets opened down heavily on speculation that Evergrande would default on its debt repayments.

Focus so far this week has been on inflation data, given we had the US reading yesterday (Tuesday 14 September 2021) and the UK’s earlier this morning.