Within hours of The Economist magazine calling for China’s central bank to cut interest rates to ease growing pressure on China’s slowing economy, it did and there are prospects of more to come.

China’s rate cuts and those encouraging words from Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank gave embattled oil and gold markets a lift on Friday.

A week of mixed influences ahead – there’s the short week in American markets because of Thanksgiving on Thursday, and some vital data, there’s the Opec meeting on Thursday, there’s also the usual end of month flow of figures from recessed Japan, and there’s also the start of our key third quarter figures in Australia, plus the Medibank float.

Once again everyone has focused on what Reserve Bank Governor, Glenn Stevens was saying in his first speech on the Australian economy in two months in Melbourne this week, and not looking more broadly at what is going on elsewhere, especially in the weakening Chinese property sector.

So will our market take a breather today after eight nasty days of selling and gloom which has seen the ASX 200 lose almost 200 points?

Forget what happened on Wall Street, the FOFA laws, the Fed’s minutes and anything else – the big news for local investors is the fall overnight in global iron ore prices to $US70.20 a tonne.

Watch our market get whacked today by yet another nasty fall in the iron ore price after weak Chinese housing data for October showed house prices falling faster than before.

As expected, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will delay the second part of the controversial sales tax increase and ask voters for a fresh mandate on December 14.

Now this is what the G20 leaders and their grandiose plans for global growth didn’t count on when they issued their statement on Sunday afternoon – a surprise lurch into recession by the world’s third biggest economy after a shock downturn in the three months to September.

Global sharemarkets were mixed over last week while commodities, led by gold, oil and iron ore fell and currencies and bonds were steady to slightly stronger.

World oil prices will again come under more pressure this week, despite gains on Friday night, our time.

Compared with the past couple of weeks, the coming week will be much quieter so far as important data and company announcements are concerned, while the results of the G20 meeting in Brisbane won’t have impact on markets or investor sentiment which is being driven more by falling commodity prices such as oil, and here in Australia iron ore, which hit a new five year low last week of $US75.40 a tonne.

Today marks the start of possibly the biggest day in China’s financial relations with the rest of the world in years with the start of direct trading links with the Shanghai stock exchange from the outside world.

Less than a week after delivering a lower quarterly profit because of a write-down of its stake in the UK retailer, Tesco, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has surprised with the $US4.7 billion buy of Duracell batteries from consumer products giant, Procter and Gamble.

Another bad night of trading for oil prices, with US oil sliding under $US75 a barrel for the first time in four years and the key Brent price in London dropping even further under the $US80 a barrel mark.

China’s economy has continued to slow at the start of the fourth quarter of the year with October reporting sluggish figures for industrial production, retail sales and urban investment.

The weakness in global oil prices took Brent crude, the so-called global marker crude type, to under $US80 a barrel for the first time in more than four years this morning.

The quarterly survey of house price movements form the Australian Bureau of Statistics has confirmed what we already know – Sydney is driving house prices higher.

Business conditions jumped sharply last month, but business confidence fell in a conflicting reading from the latest monthly survey of business from the National Australia Bank.