Checking commodity prices. West Texas Crude is trading at US$97.41 a barrel. Tapis crude’s at US$114.89 a barrel. And gold’s at US$1,614.05 five cents an ounce. The Australian dollar is just over one dollar US, 76 euro cents and 64 pence sterling.

 

For more on today's finance--David Bethany. He is a markets columnist for the Australian Financial Review. He joins us now from Sydney. David, good morning.

 

Morning, Michael.

 

We had the release of those RBA minutes yesterday and the board members made very clear they had deep concern about the potential on-going impacts of the European situation.

 

Yeah, what really the, the vote to cut interest rates this month is really a vote of no confidence in Europe’s ability to deal with its own crisis. It’s a, no matter what Europe does now, I mean, the outlook is that they, that rage will be in recession next year. And that’s weighing heavily on the Reserve Bank and I mean obviously we have flown through a fix. We’ve already seen that in China. And so that was a main driver of the bank section.