- Little net currency movement
- US third quarter GDP today

Good morning. Five years ago the government decided to increase police efficiency by giving officers smart phones with which they could send and receive emails. At a cost of £80m the project handed out more than 50,000 phones. They must really have had to shop around to pick them up at £1,500 apiece. The National Audit Office (NAO) reports that, on average, officers have spent 18 fewer minutes per shift at their desks since receiving the phones. In one force, however, they have spent an extra 109 minutes per shift in the office. But all is not lost; the NAO press release concludes that "There is still the opportunity to achieve value for money".

David Cameron took a similar line on Euroland and the euro yesterday. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos he said the political leadership still had the opportunity to save the single currency with "bold and decisive action". The prime minister even jogged their memories with a reminder of what they need to tackle this year; "Greece, banks and firewall". Meanwhile in Paris François Hollande, the pretender to President Sarkozy's throne, was setting out his manifesto for this summer's election. In a nutshell, his plan is to tax banks, hire more public sector workers and bring down the retirement age. M. Hollande did not exactly promise his unerring support for Chancellor Merkel's precious fiscal compact.

Over in Athens, where there is a fiscal compact in every handbag, the debt rescheduling negotiations have been elevated to prime ministerial level. In the opinion of Josef Ackerman, CEO of Deutsche Bank, "I'm confident that we can get our act together in Greece and avoid a major contagion [hooray], but that is still a very open question [boo]".

Other than the latest episode of the euro saga, investors found little to interest them on Thursday. A small improvement in German consumer confidence did nothing to help the euro and a sharp fall in the CBI's retail sales measure did no damage to the pound. US durable goods orders were stronger than expected in December while new home sales were weaker. Overnight figures from Tokyo showed Japan's consumer price index falling more slowly at -0.2% in calendar 2011.

The net result was relatively modest ranges for exchange rates and minimal net movement. As London opened sterling was virtually unchanged on the day against the euro, the US dollar and the Swiss franc.

This morning's opening shot was an unemployment rate of 22.9% in Spain, a figure unlikely to increase investors' enthusiasm for today's Italian treasury bill auction. The only other European statistics are Euroland's money supply and Switzerland's leading indicator. The figures that matter this afternoon are for US fourth-quarter gross domestic product and the finalised Michigan consumer sentiment index. The latter should be close to 74; the former is expected to show annualised growth of 3.0% (0.7% on a quarterly basis).

More difficult to forecast is how investors would react to a figure appreciably higher or lower than 3.0%. The most recent experience is that good news from the US economy is bad news for the safe-haven US dollar and Japanese yen, but the market can be fickle and that might not be the case today. Have a good weekend.