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As was to be expected, the Aussie dollar’s fall was choked off yesterday by the very strong jobs report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics for August which once again has raised more questions than it has answers.

Now here’s the real story for commodity exporting countries such as Australia – it’s not just falling iron ore prices that threaten to wreak havoc on the trade accounts and export income, the prices of many other products, from wheat, to sugar, to milk, to copper and coal are at multi-year lows in many cases and threaten New Zealand, Canada and Brazil as well.

As expected the Reserve Bank of New Zealand has left official interest rates on hold at 3.5% as it assesses the impact of the four rate rises so far in 2014.

Global oil prices continue to fall, with the key US and European indicators hitting multi-month lows overnight, thanks to the rise in the value of the US dollar and an unexpected gloomy forecast from OPEC.

Like Tesco in the UK retailing, and Walmart, America’s retailing giant, McDonald’s, the burger behemoth has been hit by a sales slowdown which shows little sign of going away.

There are growing signs the value of the Aussie dollar is undergoing a major reassessment by big global investors. The currency has fallen more than 2 USc this week to around 91.60 this morning.

Business confidence and conditions might have come back a little in August, according to the latest national Australia Bank survey, but don’t tell property investors, they are still piling into housing, building up for what could be a nasty shake out down the track. 

Apple shares fell, rose, then fell again overnight and this morning as the company launched the new iPhones, the new iWatch and a mobile payments system which seems to have been the big attention grabber.

So did China export millions of new iPhone 6 models in August ahead of the launch tomorrow morning, our time, of the new Apple phone, and in doing so propel the country’s monthly trade surplus to more than $US49 billion?

Oops, now who wrote something negative about the Australian economy and jobs market in the past week or so (excluding the usual cast of gloomy analysts and dedicated bears)? 

Here’s a tale of two American jobs – on Friday night the August jobs report startled markets for a while by being inconclusive. Attention had been on Friday’s report all week and in the end it was a fizzer.

After a solid week last week for most markets, it will be a warier start today.

The Australian jobs report for August will be a dominating story for local markets this week, along with Chinese economic data for last month.

Conflicting moves in the price of iron ore and the value of the Aussie dollar on Friday night will send further ripples through the local market and the prices of iron ore miners when stockmarket trading resumes here later this morning.

Faced with the growing threat of deflation and slowing growth, the European Central Bank has thrown the dice and launched its last resort – cutting interest rates and starting a program of quantitative easing that could total more than $1 trillion.