A chilling end to the year after the big freeze returned with a vengeance last month and hit markets hard. That clipped what has been a solid year.

Was anyone else suspicious that gold fell nearly 2% the day after global central banks banded together to pump billions of dollars into the global financial system? With gold such an important financial barometer, there are two ways to interpret the yellow metal's recent price fall.

In the space of two days, two quite different views of the election of the Rudd Labor Government.

Stockmarkets swung violently overnight as traders digested the news of a linked, $US100 billion move by major central banks to try and stave off the tightening credit crunch.

The US Federal Reserve has cut interest rates by a quarter of a per cent, as expected.

Make no mistake; China's economy is getting hotter.

World lead prices could be about to sent even lower with the imminent restarting of shipments from a West Australian mine that supplies 3% of global output.

Once again the credulous financial media in Britain is being used to float rumours about BHP Billiton and Rio that bear little resemblance to what has been going on in the real world.

The subprime mortgage credit crunch continues to take victims in the Australian markets, despite claims that our closeness to booming Asia would spare us the worst.

Corporate activity in the upper levels of the global mining market continues to rise with London reports over the weekend suggesting that Brazil's CVRD (Companhia Vale do Rio) had started looking at the aggressively expanding Anglo-Swiss Group, Xstrata.

It's getting harder and harder not to think that the Chinese Government and its key economic regulators might be on the wrong side of their continued battle to cool the hot Chinese economy.

Australian investors got no leads from Wall Street on Friday and the market today will be a bit directionless.