Australia: With market forecasters expecting a rise of 190k jobs in March, and a result of 216k reported, equity markets in both Europe and the US were up strongly.

The USD strengthened initially against the AUD as the market expected that US Federal Reserve might curtail the QE2 program earlier than its planned ending in June.

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This feeling saw European equity markets rise strongly with the German DAX index up by 2%, the FTSE 1.7% and the Euro Stoxx up by 1.8%.

US markets all jumped as well until New York Fed President Dudley said the Fed was well away from achieving full employment and price stability which confirmed that short term interest rates in the US are likely to be on hold until next year.

This pushed the Dow down from its highs but it still finished up by 0.5% to 12,376 with the S&P500 up a similar amount to 1,332.

Oil continued to push higher hitting over US$108 a barrel, a 30 month high, and gold was little changed at the end of the day at US$1429 an ounce.

Also helping the AUD was slightly better PMI data from China for March than the previous month.

Today the ANZ jobs ad data is released and tomorrow afternoon the RBA will announce it decision on the cash rate where virtually all market forecasters expect no change in the 4.75% cash rate.

Majors: The data behind the US job numbers is encouraging with private payrolls rising by 230k, which is similar to the increase in February of 240k.

There was a loss of 14k in government jobs and the unemployment rate fell slightly 0.1% to 8.8% in March.

Particularly encouraging was the rise in temporary help services jobs of 23k, which historically has led to acceleration in full time employment in subsequent months.

The EUR continues to remain strong vs. the USD as speculation increases that the ECB may raise interest rates on Thursday against the background of further downgrades to sovereign debt of Ireland and Portugal.

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