Australia: US and UK markets were closed overnight for the Memorial Day and Bank public holidays, which resulted in an extremely thin trading session; reducing the volume of FX trades by almost two thirds.

With a large amount of top tier data to be released in Australia and the US towards the end of the week, it's likely that we will see little movement in the markets until tomorrow's local Q1 GDP data release.

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The figure is expected to show that the economy has shrunk by at least 1%, mainly due to the effects of the Queensland floods earlier in the year.

Today during our trading session sees the release of the Balance of Payments for Q1, as well as the building approvals and private sector credit, both for the month of April.

While the market is expecting to see a widening in the balance of payments deficit, they are expecting a solid increase in the private sector credit of 0.5%.

Housing data is usually a fairly volatile figure; therefore attention will be paid to the result ex Queensland, to really gauge how the housing market is fairing.

While the markets will be paying attention to the results, they're unlikely to be market movers.

Majors: European markets were also subdued due to the public holidays.

Markets were surprised to enjoy a trading session which was free of continual comments from IMF and EU officials regarding the sovereign debt crisis.

While the markets are still watching for headlines about the problems in Greece, last night many of the comments made had already been heard.

Later this week or early next week there is likely to be an important announcement made about whether Greece has done enough to receive the next part of their bailout package.

Many are not confident that they have done enough, with the country's debt now at more than EUR340bio.

The only offshore data that was released last night was the Canadian monthly GDP growth for March, which showed that growth in the region was slowing, after a growth spurt in the first few months of this year.

Analysts have warned that the growth was short-lived and will see weaker results through the remainder of the year; one reason why it's unlikely that we will see the Bank of Canada's interest rate move from 1% until the end of 2011.

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