Australian June half earnings reports will start to trickle through this week. So far there has been a smattering from investment companies such as Milton Corp, Australian Foundation, Mirrabooka, Euroz and a few updates – Kogan.com comes to mind as a flop.

Oil futures settled lower in Europe and the US on Friday, ending a three-day streak after Russia’s energy minister indicated that a coalition of producers could pump more crude than agreed by the end of the year.

A busy week sees important central bank meetings in the US, Japan and the UK, as well as India and Brazil. Of these meetings those of the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan will matter globally and in Australia.

Gold futures again lost ground on Friday with nary an issue to provide any spark of interest.

US stocks closed lower Friday following disappointing results from Twitter and bellwethers, including oil major Exxon Mobil and chipmaker, Intel.

So will those alarmist economics writers and others get the message that interest rates will not be rising anytime soon after the June quarter Consumer Price Index delivered another less than starling figure – with most of the inflationary pressures again due to actions by the Federal and State Governments?

Did we see the trigger for the widely predicted stockmarket slide? Facebook surprised with weaker than expected second quarter figures (they were still pretty good) yesterday morning, Australian time and then doubled down by forecasting a flattening in growth and the continuing rise in costs and whooshka, the shares plunged in after hours trading on Wall Street, slicing more than 20% off the company’s market value or upwards of $US132 billion (or nearly $A180 billion).

Not even the mighty Warren Buffett could withstand the capital management pressure from investors. Last week policy changes by the Berkshire Hathaway board on when the company will conduct buybacks had the desired impact and stopped the rot in the company’s share price.

Wednesday sees the release of the June quarter and 2017-18 Consumer Price Index (CPI) and don’t believe anything you might read about a boost or pressure on interest rates – nothing will happen – the Reserve Bank has made it clear.

Gold prices eased higher Friday, reducing some of their weekly losses, as comments from President Donald Trump on US interest rates and the dollar, hit investor sentiment and undermined the US dollar.

The ASX will start weak and lower later this morning after an inconclusive end on Wall Street on Friday ended a rough week.

A busy week ahead with developments in the global trade war – President Trump’s increasingly erratic tweets will be watched because of the restarting of the Nafta trade talks with Canada and Mexico; US June quarter GDP, a meeting of the European Central Bank, inflation in Australia and an election in Pakistan.

The performance of tech giants like Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon will dominate this week’s June quarter earnings flood in the US.

The slowdown in the Australian jobs market seen since the start of this year, came to a halt in June with a rebound in the number of new jobs created in both trend and seasonally adjusted terms – 27,000 new jobs were created in trend terms which are more reliable than the seasonally adjusted figures which showed a rise of 50,900 new positions.

Has Warren Buffett blinked and fallen into line with the prevailing Wall Street belief that favours share buybacks?