My
understanding of global financial markets today Sunday 8th November 2026
Last
week’s main US Midterm election result led to a Democrat majority in both the
House of Congress and the Senate. On paper, this means a reduction of President
Trump’s powers.
With
many Democrat candidates gaining votes over datacentre concerns, the result
triggered a sell-off in AI-related company shares. The Nasdaq index fell by
over 5% as stock worth over three trillion plunged in value.
Disappointing
company results in some of the AI stock, particularly semiconductor and memory
chip manufacturers added to investor fear.
Was
the fall from last week just a small correction or part of a bigger crash or
even recession? Opinion is divided but the fact that bellwether company Nvidia
has shown no sign of slowing suggests the fall of last week is a temporary dip
and that demand for the great AI roll-out is not finished yet.
There
were also some other odd price movements last week. The price of Brent oil and
WTI came crashing down by 10% with news of a Qatari led peace plans for the
Gulf.
The
US Dollar basket index rose to $102 as investors sought value in the safety of
Treasury bonds and the prospects of a rise in Fed interest rates. Furtherconfidence in the Dollar came in the greater
than expected rise of new job starts (165,000) coming out of the Non Farm
Payroll figures.
It
seems strange that Gold plunged in value, dipping well below $4,000 for the
first time in months. One would have thought it would rise in value as a safe
haven amidst all the uncertainty.
What
will happen next week? Will US stocks decline further? Will oil prices stay
high?
Just
about Oil, it’s worth noting that, following the fractured result of the
Israeli general election, yes, Netanyahu is still technically the prime
minister, but he has limited power and would find it hard to officially back an
American assault on Iran or Kharg Island. It would have to be an Iranian attack
that would provoke an Israeli reaction. So will the Iranians voluntarily attack
US or Israeli targets when they are trying to re-form an oil supply chain?
A bad week with only 8 out of 17 predictions going right. This was largely because of a persistently strong dollar and AI debt worries working their way into stock markets.
For the week just gone, I got 11 predictions of market moves right and 6 wrong.
The markets that I am following are:
EUR/USD GBP/USD USD/CHF USD/JPY
AUD/USD NZD/USD US Dollar
DXY
Spot Gold Copper Soybeans Corn
WTI Oil Brent Oil
US Tec/Nasdaq Wall St/Dow FTSE 100 Germany DAX
The biggest clangers were for the two Oil markets. Rather
than a gentle decline in pricing owing to better supply chains, there were steep
rises.
There doesn't seem to be any end in sight as Houthi attacks have now
spread from the Bab Al-Mandab Straits to oil fields in the Saudi interior.
President Trump repeatedly claims that the US will start bombing the Iranians
again after the Mid-term elections November 3rd.
Last week, the NASDAQ was
spooked by AI debt-financing woes, in particular, pertaining to a "neo" cloud
company called CoreWeave (that I'd never heard of before, shame on me!). It
transpired that there is a potential blackhole of future debt amounting to
billions of dollars unless financing deals aren't made now.
We're told that the
scale of future revenue is all but guaranteed and will easily cover the
company's ambitious investments, but for now banks such as JP Morgan and MUFG
are being cautious with their commitments.
Is this a warning shot of a possible
huge market correction, or just a temporary blip?
For this week it's been
$112-a-barrel Brent Oil ($103 WTI) that has begun impacting European currency
prices and European stock markets. Higher oil prices feed into the economy
fueling higher inflation and stymieing economic growth.
Now the question is, how
much longer will the oil price rise? Will Brent reach the Iran war highs of
April 2026 when it reached $116? With no sign of peace, it may seem so...
So,
this is an invoice dated 13th May 1974 from my dad, Howard Thompson.
It’s for the hire of lighting equipment for Geordierama,
which was a popular revue show in the North East of England in the early 1970s.
Lighting gear don't come cheap
The
invoice is addressed to the show’s producer, Roger Burgess who also worked as a
producer at BBC Newcastle.
Geordierama was a
collection of sketches and comic songs, gently poking fun at the dialogue and
way of life of the Geordie people. It was written and performed by a collective
of local writers, actors and musicians including Scott Dobson, Eric Boswell and
TV’s George House and Mike Neville.
It
leant heavily on Scott Dobson’s popular book of the time, Larn Yersel’ Geordie, which originated as a humorous look at the
origins of the Geordie dialect (“Am gannin’ hyem to wor lass” I’m going home to
see my wife; “Walk? I canna wack! You want me to work?” I can’t even walk;
etc.)
Somehow,
my Dad, who was also theatre lighting designer in his spare time, got involved
in the show.
The
show was a moveable feast and had lots of one-off spells at theatres and venues
all over the region.
It
may even have had different iterations such as Whatever Happened to Newcastle? with Mike and George as shown in
the poster.
s
Whatever Happened? promo
It
became a regular feature for a while at the annual Newcastle Festival where it
was staged at the Newcastle City Hall.
Newcastle Festival 1976 promo poster
It
also appeared on BBC Radio Newcastle. Publicity-wise, it almost certainly
benefited from the inclusion of Mike Neville in the cast who was immensely
popular as the nightly presenter of the BBC Look
North news programme.
Getting
back to the invoice, it’s for stage lighting equipment needed for the production
which was off to the Alnwick Playhouse Cinema for a performance in the late
spring of 1974. Lighting control equipment, isolator switch fuses, lanterns, rigging,
de-rigging and transportation: that’ll be £132. Seems reasonable to me…
It
must have been a success as in the same collection of papers, a letter is sent
a few days later from Roger thanking my dad for his work. How polite! (Of
course, this is what people did in the 70s – much better than a one-line e-mail
or a text message, I think!)
Fun fact: the
musical director of Geordierama, Eric Boswell was also the composer of the
Christmas song and schools carols favourite, “Little Donkey”.
When
I was a kid, my dad, Howard Thompson, who worked at Tyne Tees Television, would
come home with wads and wads of old routine sheets which we then went on to use
as scraps of paper.
Tyne Tees TV routine sheet from 19th February, 1971
What
was the routine sheet? For the presentation telecine department, it was the
detailed listing of that day’s items to be broadcast.
It
involved the precise time of every programme, every commercial break, trailer
and announcement set out in columns, with references to sources such as TC
(transmission control), VT (video tape) and much more. It was the go-to reference
for the transmission controllers and staff associated with live broadcast.
I
must admit, I never actually wrapped my head round the machinations of where
every piece of content came from and how it was exactly sent out into the ether.
Lord, how patiently my old dad tried to explain the principles of broadcast!
But
a very good explanation piece, emanating from ATV, then still in London, can be found here.
Back
in 1957, it appears that all the ads, ‘spots’ as they were called, were collated
onto to rolls of film and set up on a telecine machine.
At
Tyne Tees, the nerve centre of the transmission control and telecine operation
was located in the Control Room – a hallowed room with a bewildering array of screens,
dials and switches.
By
1971, when these routine sheets were being used, the times were changing and a
sophisticated means of ‘taking feeds’ of programming from other ITV sources like
Yorkshire, ATV and London Weekend was in place. Later iterations of the Control
Room would see new equipment installed, particularly involving professional-standard
video-based machinery.
All
this new technology worked smoothly for the most part but every now and again technical
gremlins took the better of transmission control. Very rarely, there would be unaccounted
gaps and yawning silences – all being fed live into people’s homes as they
watched the telly.
The
glitches were minimal – perhaps no more than a couple of seconds and barely
noticeable to the casual TV viewer but if Dad was in the room when it occurred,
he would start to gasp or mutter, vowing to find out how this piece of
incompetence had just happened, presumably prompting inquest at the Studios the
next day.
The
worst of these interruptions came in the 1980s on a Christmas Day.
HM
The Queen’s annual address to the nation is always broadcast at 3 o’clock
precisely but on this occasion, for Tyne Tees views, nothing happened 15:00:00.
It was more like 15:06:00. You might think a handful of seconds doesn’t matter,
but this was the most important broadcast of the whole year, being broadcast in
lockstep with the BBC. Cue my Dad’s mortification. I think Top Brass initiated
an inquest. It turned it was a faulty of feed being supplied by Central TV or
wherever. Heads might have rolled.
Anyway,
from that day onwards, a ritual formed where, pudding being finished, he got up
from the Christmas lunch table, got in his car and screeched up at the Studios in
City Road where, at precisely 3pm, he would witness the smooth and orderly broadcast
of Her Majesty’s message.
Getting
back to the page lay-out of the routine sheet, these are from Friday 19th
February 1971 and Wednesday 23rd February 1971.
They’re
both from the last minutes of the day’s broadcast (meaning, for us kids, the
bottom of the routine sheet day’s pile would be the top of our reverse-side scrap
paper pile).
Such
was the detail of all the timings, we can see that on Friday’s sheet, at four
minutes past midnight: 00:04:49, a caption would appear on viewers’ screens.
Seven
seconds later a run of eight commercials, lasting either 15 seconds or 30
seconds, would be broadcast. Tonight’s final messages came from Playtex ’18 hour’
girdle, Hamlet cigars, Heinz baked beans, Rennies indigestion tablets, Ryan’s
Holidays, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, Alibi biscuits and Junior Disprin.
That’s
quite a mix of products – no wonder it’s topped off with a headache
tablet!
At
00:03:43, the concluding19 minutes 37 seconds of the cowboy film, The Hanging Tree are left, followed by 3
minutes of ads.
The final minutes of Wednesday's routine sheet (23rd February, 1971)
Wednesday
evening’s broadcast schedules ends with an announcement at 00:19:28 followed,
15 seconds later, by a visual graphic of the clock and then at 00:19:53 the
National Anthem. The night comes to a complete close at 00:20:28 by a blank
screen, after which a 5 second long ‘courtesy announcement’ floats into the
scene and by 00:21:03, it’s all over for the day – CLOSE DOWN.
In
its day, there must have been a team of at least a dozen people, if not more, working
to make all this happen.
Today,
the process of sending material out for broadcast is called ‘Playout’ and all an
individual needs is a decent laptop and some specialist software to do the job
of the many.
That’s
one of the reasons why the Tyne Tees TV of the 1970s employing a thousand in City
Road, Newcastle today now consists of just a handful of people operating out of
an industrial unit in Gateshead.
I didn't factor in the strong US dollar for the week just gone. US 10 Year Treasury bond yields rose to 5.273% causing an inflow of money into the US and a strengthened US dollar - the most remarkable change was the Dollar basket DXY rising to $1.0160.
I am interested in US employment numbers. The Non-Farm Payroll figures for September showed a decline in the number of job starts. There were also some retrospective downward re-ratings of August and July figures by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Elsewhere, figures from bodies like ADP show expanding employment. How can this be? Yes, the US economy seems to be fully charged but surely the influence of AI should now be affecting employment numbers?
Market predictions
(currencies and commodities) Saturday 3rd October 2026
Here's a page from the Shields Weekly News, the local
newspaper for North Shields, dated Thursday, August 29th, 1985.
I
found it in amongst some clippings kept by my old dad, Howard Thompson who was
involved with the rescue boat team at Tynemouth Sailing Club. The reason he
kept this item is because the club was hosting the national Enterprise dinghy yacht
competition. It must have been over the August Bank Holiday weekend.
But
disaster struck in the way of Force 6 gale, unusual for that time of the year.
The
news item tells us that over twenty dinghies capsized.
Ordinarily,
the sailing club holds races in the more placid waters of the estuary of the
Tyne, inside the safety of the North and South Piers.
Because
of the prestigious nature of this race, it was staged in the more dangerous
waters of the open North Sea where safety would have been a bigger concern.
And
now a storm kicked in.
Having
a rough idea of forecast, one can only imagine if the race organisers had
agonised over whether the event should take place.
Having
had direct experience in helping my Dad with rescue operations in the inaugural
1974, primarily by sitting in Tynemouth Coastguard station with a powerful set
of military-grade binoculars (captured from the Germans) and watching out to
sea if any boats capsized, I know that twenty going over would have been highly
alarming and a real danger to life.
Someone,
then, made the decision to call out the RAF in Boulmer and deploy Sea King
helicopters to rescue those sailors stuck overboard.
It
must have been quite a dramatic and arduous day for the organisers, quite a
relief to know that, too my knowledge at least, there weren’t any
life-threatening casualties and that all the capsized boats recovered,
presumably towed back into the Estuary and safely to Sailing Club’s base at the
Prior’s Haven.
As
a kid, I used to pore over the Shields Weekly News. I don’t know what attracts
me to reading local newspapers – I would like to think it’s because I recognise
a street or a place or the name of someone. Anyway, all human life – for good
or for bad used to be in these pages.
The
newspaper items are of the time – 1985 was a very poor era on Tyneside. It was
at the height of Thatcher’s Britain where traditional industry and mining were
in their final throes and the dole queues were long.
There
wasn’t much money about in North Shields so it’s no surprise the news page is
filled with petty crime – there were lot of break-ins and minor robberies.
So,
in 1985 it was perfectly normal for somewhere like the Rex Bingo Hall next to
North Shields railway station to have had its fruit machines robbed,
Somebody
nicking nine cartons of frozen cod from the back of a lorry on the Fish Quay
didn’t turn heads.
Couple
of fourteen year old boys playing with matches in the backyard. So what? When a
lit match hot exploded on impact with the petrol can, well the kid “was being
stupid” – reported to the police and probably met with a clip round the ear.
What
a page this was!
To top it off a “nightclub incident”! Yes, a bit of fisty-cuffs outside Mingles on the Whitley Bay seafront.
Mingles was a notorious dive, popular with all the cool kids at the Sixth Form
College. In its heyday when it was a rock club dive featuring frequent
appearances from famous local band the Tygers
of Pan Tang who went on to get a bit of national success.
As
a gawky stay-at-home teenager, I was very jealous of missing out, although perhaps
not if I’d been punched in the face by a drunk outside the front door.
