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Minutes from the Federal Reserve’s September meeting showed policymakers were anxious about a global economic slowdown weighing on the economy, which investors took to mean that rates would stay at near-zero levels this year.

The gold price surged by almost $40 or over 3% on Friday, at its peak and is trading only slightly weaker at around $1,135 per troy ounce as the new week gets underway.

India’s largest lender, SBI, cut its base rate by 40 basis points (bps) to 9.3 per cent from 9.7 per cent, effective from October 5.

USA energy firms cut 26 oil rigs in the latest week, the biggest reduction since April and the fifth straight weekly decline, data showed on Friday, a sign low prices were pushing drillers away from the well pad. Baker Hughes reported that the gas rig count fell by one to 197 in...

Expectations of lower demand after revelations last month that Volkswagen falsified USA vehicle emission tests, which a few believe could affect demand for diesel cars, hit platinum prices.

USA stocks climbed Friday morning after three days of losses.

Ninety-five percent of Venezuela’s exports result from crude oil. Exports year-to-date to the USA have risen, but remain under pressure.

The debt ceiling. On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew warned that the US would exhaust its ability to borrow on November 5 unless Congress increases the debt ceiling. Emerging economies such as Brazil and Turkey are struggling to grow at all.

The USA has experienced soft patches in job growth before in this expansion, and officials have been expecting job growth to slow from its quick pace earlier this year and last.

The rate of United Kingdom economic growth slowed to a two-and-a-half year low in September, according to PMI survey data, suggesting that the economy sank further into a soft patch at the end of the third quarter.

In its third rate cut this fiscal (20 bps in April and 10 bps in June), Axis Bank cut its base rate to 9.50 per cent from 9.85 per cent. “The new rate will be with effect from October 5, 2015″.

Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs across the US, increased by 10,000 to a seasonally adjusted 277,000 in the week ended September 26, the Labor Department said Thursday.

In a speech late Thursday, Fed Chair Janet Yellen, who spoke a week after the Fed delayed a long-anticipated rate hike, said she and other Fed policymakers do not expect recent global economic and financial market developments to significantly affect the central bank’s policy.

Brent crude oil was virtually flat at $48.20 a barrel, heading for a near 10 percent fall this month.

The jobless rate, which is derived from a separate survey of households, was unchanged only because 350,000 workers stopped looking for work last month and were no longer counted as part of the labour force.