Last week was strong for global equities, with the US Federal Reserve retaining its cautious stance on raising interest rates and the Bank of Japan unveiling tweaks to its own monetary policy.
 
Gains on Wall Street followed the latest meeting of the US Federal Reserve, at which the central bank decided yet again to leave borrowing costs unchanged.
 
Expectations for rate increases next year were also scaled back, with the US Federal Reserve deciding to remove one planned rate hike from next year. The US dollar weakened in response, although no one is expecting a more material decline in the currency in the near term.
 
Another currency riding a wave of volatility was the Japanese Yen after the Bank of Japan announced a new strategy to steepen the yield curve via designated purchases of Japanese government bonds.
 
If the Bank of Japan remains credible by meeting the yield curve targets, they will have the option to take the policy rate into negative territory, whilst limiting the damage to Japanese banks.
 
Oil prices remained volatile last week. Price fluctuations over the last few months have been driven by OPEC ministers making comments about potential output freeze deals in an attempt to 'talk up' prices.
 
But most of these comments have proved unfounded. The market is skeptical about Saudi Arabia's offer to cut production if Iran agrees to freeze output. And Libya and Nigeria both recently stated that they want to increase output significantly over the rest of this year as their political situations stabilise.
 
Elsewhere in commodities, the price of premium hard coking coal has more than doubled in the past six weeks – to more than $200 a tonne – as supplies have dwindled and buyers have scrambled to find cargoes in the spot market.
 
Here in Australia, Newcastle and Wollongong will be happy with the situation as sustained price gains could add billions of dollars in profits to some of the industry's biggest producers.
 
The price surge is being driven by production curbs in China, where the government is restricting the number of working days at domestic coal mines to 276 a year, down from 330.
 
Also flash PMIs published by Markit on Friday provided an early indication of the state of the world economy. A weighted average of the three manufacturing PMIs for advanced economies edged up from 51.3 in August to 51.6 in September.
 
Of the major economies, there was a small improvement in the flash PMI for Japan, which suggests its economy is coping quite well with the strength of the Yen. And the manufacturing PMI for the euro-zone also edged up.
 
The manufacturing PMI for the US dropped suggesting that the US economy may not have accelerated in the third quarter.