Many key global equity markets across the world ticked up over the week, and, after a volatile ¾ of the year for investors, November has turned out to be a strong month for global markets.

Welcome to this Astute Market Overview of the last week.

The eurozone consumer price index measure (which is often shortened to CPI) was released on Tuesday by Eurostat. It’s a key measure of inflation (which has been surging globally this year), and so it comes as a relief to see that the key inflation measure for October showed that inflation in the eurozone is cooling. The measure came in at 10% on the nose, which means that prices are still 10% higher than last year, however, this increase is both lower than the previous month, and lower than broad economist expectations. This will bring relief to the European Central Bank (ECB), who (along with many other central banks globally) have been putting monetary policy to work to tackle inflation and bring it back down towards target (the ECB targets 2% inflation for a healthy economy).

In the US, despite rising inflation eating into consumers’ income, Amazon confirmed that they had their biggest ever Thanksgiving holiday weekend, which starts with Thanksgiving, runs through Black Friday and the weekend, and ends on Cyber Monday. Customers took to their computers, tablets and phones to purchase a record number of products from the online retailer.

In other US news, jobs data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics broadly painted a picture of a higher level of employment than forecast, with an increase in average earnings. This shows that the labour market isn’t yet cooling by as much as is hoped.

Whilst the figures won’t be great news for those willing inflation in the US to come down, the recent spate of large interest rate hikes in the US will take some time to fully have their impact – inflation has already started to ease in the region.

Next week, some of the things we’ll be looking out for include:

• Eurozone retail sales
• Eurozone and Japanese GDP
• And, Chinese CPI.

See you then.