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.

Wall Street ended April with something of a bang, hitting a series of intraday highs on the Dow and the S&P 500 this morning in the wake of the Fed’s decision to continue cutting its huge spending program.

Sell off, what sell off, as futures show a rise after yesterday’s slide.

Slowly the shape of a new set of prudential controls over home lending, are emerging and will soon see the light of day as the country’s key banking regulator, APRA, prepares to issue a new set of rules.

So will this have an impact on investor confidence, or was Wall Street’s swinging day of trading overnight really a short, dead cat bounce seen in an hour to and hour and a half of late trading?

Investors are again being asked to put their faith in the Spotless brand.

The impact from the stellar results from Apple and Facebook didn’t last long – a day at most – on Wall Street with a sell-off on Friday led by the tech-heavy stocks in the Nasdaq and other markets leading the way down.

This week sees a big test of the Australian market’s current bout of confidence on multiple fronts in what will be the first full week of trading in three weeks.

Despite the rising tensions in Ukraine and talk of a tougher approach from Russia to gas sales, New York oil futures closed lower on Friday night for the worst week in a month.

Now here’s a story you probably won’t read amid all the talk of slowing China and another fall in world iron ore prices – global crude steel production in March jumped to a new all time monthly high of more than 140 million tonnes, up on both March 2013 and February this year.

Shares in Apple and Facebook jumped in after hours trading this morning after the two tech giants reported better than expected quarterly reports.

Just as the chances of an interest rate rise here have receded, New Zealand got its second rate rise in just over a month this morning when the country’s central bank lifted its key rate to 3.0%.