Forget last night’s budget from Federal Treasurer, Joe Hockey and his assumptions.  Focus instead on the latest Chinese economic data release and wonder if our biggest market can carry this economy for the next year.

A record day on Wall Street with the Dow and the Standard & Poor’s 500 hit new record highs.

The local stockmarket eased and the Aussie dollar traded in a tight range ahead of tonight’s well-leaked Federal budget.

After the weakness of the previous week, last week saw a slightly better performance from the Australian market relative to what happened in some other markets offshore.

World iron ore prices continue to dip towards $US100 a tonne, putting more pressure on the Australian sharemarket, the share prices of the big miners and the Australian economy.

Tomorrow’s Federal budget dominates the coming week.

All those local and international ‘experts’ who claimed the recent slide in the world iron ore price would cause a crunch in China’s steel industry and damage Australia exporters, will have to take another look at their doom and gloom forecasts, again, after China yesterday reported a surprise surge in key imports in April.

China’s foreign trade position seems to have steadied amid the crackdown on false invoicing lurks which distorted the data for much of 2013.

Good news from China, especially in iron ore imports and trade generally, plus a better than expected jobs report for April combined to send the Aussie dollar and stockmarket higher yesterday.

There was some good news and a lot of bad news from the latest quarterly report from News Corp – the company’s newspapers in Australia remain a black hole with the slide in revenues and earnings continuing, as it has done for the past three years. But book publishing perked up, online property company, REA Group again performed strongly, Foxtel had a solid quarter, but Fox Sports didn’t.

As expected there was no rate change from the Reserve Bank yesterday and none are envisaged for the foreseeable future.

Yes, the trade surplus for March dipped to $731 million, down from a surplus of $1.257 billion in February and market forecasts of a figure of around $1 billion.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank (BEN) shares are expected to resume trading today after entering a trading halt to announce a capital raising to fund the $1.7 billion purchase of Rural Finance, from the Victorian Government.

The Reserve Bank board meeting today will have found nothing in the economic data issued yesterday – building approvals again slowed in March, car sales were down (because of less selling days in April), but job ads rose for the 4th month in a row, lending more credence to the idea the labour market had steadied.

It’s another big week in Australia for market-changing news from the economy and business, here and from offshore.

The rising tensions in Ukraine saw gold rise on Friday night our time, but it didn’t move the value of the Aussie dollar which firmed back towards 93 USc again.

I suppose it was to be expected, but the sell off in ANZ shares yesterday in the wake of what was mostly a positive interim profit is a bit cynical.

The Australian dollar remained firm off the back of contradictory reports from China of a steadying in activity in the manufacturing sector, and yet another fall in world iron ore prices.