Mate, that stuff would barely cause a ripple on a quiet day, let alone on a Friday in the middle of the worst financial crisis of the last 100+ years. Throw your economics textbook out the window. The financial commentators will always come out with a convincing explanation as to why the markets did what they did on the day, after the action has gone down, but when it comes to predicting the markets and identifying what is significant at the cutting edge, they're clueless. The charts never lie - when they go up it's because more people were buying than selling and if it goes down it's because more people were selling than buying. Beyond passing interest and knowing when to take a day off, I couldn't care less about the news.