Today is the first Friday of the month, so all aboard the good ship Payroll, as US jobless figures are released this afternoon amid the usual scrum of forecasts and media hype.

See the bottom of this blog for the US Non Farm Payroll results…

But it is an important data release, and the Dollar is treading water against the Pound and Euro until we get to see the numbers after lunch.

The consensus is for a third consecutive month of decline with -105K jobs lost, and an unemployment rate of 9.6 percent, still stubbornly high given the impressive pace of job creation in March and April.

The figure was made even more important in light of the surprisingly good ISM figure earlier in the week, and continuing with the naval theme, should give us a clue as to when QE2 may dock over in the US.

The ECB left rates unchanged at 1% yesterday, as expected in light of the better than expected GDP performance in the second quarter of this year and the high levels of confidence indicators during the summer.

They also revised upwards its growth forecast ranges for 2010 from 0.7%-1.3% to 1.4%-1.8%. Nevertheless, President Trichet remained cautious and said that the ECB expects the pace of economic growth to decelerate over the second half of the year. The ECB also announced that they have extended emergency lending measures for banks into 2011, remaining in crisis mode due to the risk of a renewed U.S. recession putting the euro-area’s rebound in jeopardy.

This morning ECB governing council member, Nowotny, said that any ECB exit (from the current QE stance) would start with liquidity, followed by collateral quality and finally, interest rates. The Euro’s value was mostly unaffected.

The slow decline of Sterling over the past week continued yesterday as a report showed U.K. house prices slid the most in six months in August. Data from the Nationwide Building Society showed that the average home price dropped 0.9 percent from July. Another report also showed that an index of British construction fell last month to the lowest since February.

Non-Farm Payrolls Update

The US job data has been released and has come in much better than expected. Payrolls fell 54,000 much better than the expected drop of 105,000.

In CFDs we have seen a bounce in equities as a result and some unwinding of USD and JPY strength on the back of the data.

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