i have no watch on. does anybody wear a watch these days? i guess if you travel a lot, it s helpful. i keep the rolex in the safe, is that what we did? more than must have clocks to keep us up-to-date. and we re one minute into today s program, so let s tell what you is coming up. japanese consumers spend their way to growth in the first quarter. we talk to former currency czar at 11:00 cet. and we ll be live in athens. voters heading to the polls next month. and we ll talk with portfolio manager scott richard in cleveland. he s bullish on bouillon. and we re live in madrid ahead of the key bond auction. that economy remains mired if recession. plus we ll talk to roman scott who says that all that matters right now is you how the u.s. economy will perform over the next few months. that will be an interesting conversation. he ll join us fairly shortly. first the spanish economy has been confirmed in recession for the first three months of the year. gdp falling 0.
people think the social networking giant is just a passing fad. so warm welcome to the program. we kick off with italy. surprise number from germany first thing this morning. grew much stronger than expected in the first quarter. contraction of minus 0.8%, annual contraction of minus 1.1%. the good news if there is any is that the fourth quarter is unrevised down. so contracting the third consecutive quarterly decline in activity, the steepest contraction for three years. the data weaker than expected, as well. look at the composite figures. so far we ve learned germany was much stronger than expected in the first quarter, france was just about flat. but it did avoid recession. and it comes on top of the spanish data which was weaker than expected, as well. we ll get hollande is being inaugurated as president. gorgeous pictures there. this comes as we ve just been discussing france s comment all but stagnant in the first quarter. you can see the tough challenge he
you may notice something is a little bit different. it s great to be here. the other side of the pobd. the same show, but a whole new show. yes. and you re here for as long as we can make this work. exactly. hopefully through the end of the week, at least. so much going on. you really feel like in london there is so much going on in financial reform. huge headlines about jpmorgan. so plenty to cover. i m thrilled you re with us. that s the new format, kelly and i for the rest the future. coming up, the first installment of our trade link series. and in berlin, angela merkel s party suffers defeat. silvia will tell us what it can mean for the german leader. china releases billions of dollars in to the economy after delivering a 50 basis point cut in the bank of reserve requirement ratio. we ll have the details. gr and jpmorgan ceo says its $2 billion loss is not life threatening for the bank, but will the market agree. also greece s president will attempt t
force lenders to set aside an extra 35 billion euros when it unveils a plan to clean up the banking system today. lots to get through, but we start off from news from the iea which says oil prices are likely to stay high because of geopolitical riskitic despite a rise in world supply. they say global oil supply rose 600,000 barrels a day to 91 million a day in april. 90% of the increase coming from opec. we know that saudi arabia is well over 10 million barrels a day, but the iea says that uncertainty remains and last year they released oil stocks, would be ready to act again if necessary. brent as you can see has been declining over the last few week. we ll have more analysis of that. first, though, let s get back to the big story over the last 24 hours. jpmorgan announces a $2 billion loss in its own portfolio, the losses which occurred in the past six weeks stem from bad bets and credit default swaps made by the chief investment office which is designed to hedge the comp
the euro. tokyo leading asia s losses as investors run for the exits following the election results. in europe traders drop riskier assets as fiscal commitments are put in doubt. hello, everybody. welcome to the show worldwide exchange is what you re watching here. the day after the big day of elections across europe where we again saw big surprises taking place in greece with regards to who now is running off with the majority of the votes. and on top of that also a change in power in france. what we re looking at is a german heat map. these are the german constituents because of course it s a bank holiday here in the uk, so no trade on the ftse. just two characters trading in positive territory. basf leading the way lower by just over 2.5%. the european markets trading, xetra dax lower by 1.5%, just an hour into trade. cac 40 on of by 1.5%. ibex down by almost 2% and the swiss market just shy of 1%. we re till sstill seeing sellin across the european banking center. in