Recap: We sat on the sidelines on Friday, like we normally do, due to the volatility that comes along with the low volume weekend trading.
The pair did not make any major moves, but did have a nice upward flagpole that broke an intraday falling resistance and now appears to be forming a bit of a flag consolidation period which could spell more gains for the pair.
FOREX-Euro rallies on optimism that bloc to stay intact - Reuters UK
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NYSE and AMEX quotes delayed by at least 20 minutes. Nasdaq delayed by at least 15 minutes. For a complete list of exchanges and delays, please click here.
Forex: EUR/GBP down after Sentix index - FXStreet.com
FOREX-Euro rallies on optimism that bloc to stay intact - Reuters UK
Thomson Reuters is the world's largest international multimedia news agency, providing investing news, world news, business news, technology news, headline news, small business news, news alerts, personal finance, stock market, and mutual funds information available on Reuters.com, video, mobile, and interactive television platforms. Thomson Reuters journalists are subject to an Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests.
NYSE and AMEX quotes delayed by at least 20 minutes. Nasdaq delayed by at least 15 minutes. For a complete list of exchanges and delays, please click here.
Portugal props up banks with €6.6bn - Daily Telegraph
"We met our quantitative objectives," the minister added, noting a rapid reduction in its external imbalances despite a global economy showing clear signs of slowing down.
"Our budget roll-out remains in line with our 2012 targets and the government should be able to bring the deficit down to 4.5pc of GDP (gross domestic product) as planned," he said.
Last year, Portugal became the third eurozone country after Greece and Ireland to be bailed out by the EU, IMF and European Central Bank.
In a statement, auditors from the so-called troika said Portugal "remains on track despite continued challenges," while stressing that "rising unemployment has emerged as a pressing concern."
The troika added that growth in 2012 "may hold up better than expected" with GDP in 2012 "now expected to decline by 3pc as opposed to 3.25pc before and "subdued growth" expected in 2013.
The muted optimism was came after stark warning last week by Portugal's central bank that the country's banking sector was vulnerable to a "very major risk of contagion of adverse developments on an international level".
"These risks are still at very high levels and were exacerbated ... by the reinforcement of the connections between the banking system and sovereign risk in a growing number of countries in the euro area," the central bank said.
The central bank also warned that three of Portugal's four biggest banks would require state intervention in order to meet the EBA targets, preparing the ground for Monday's announcement.
Pushed deeper into recession by austerity measures, the government has issued a new outlook for unemployment for 2012 of 15.5pc, expected to reach 16pc in 2013.
Mr Gaspar said the deterioration in the jobless numbers required a response that facilitated work.
Work code reforms launched to make hiring more flexible must be pursued, the minister said adding that results would be seen in the "medium term".
The troika audit statement agreed with the analysis: "Recent approval of the revised labour code should attenuate job losses," it said.
"Nevertheless, further action to improve the functioning of the labour market is urgent," the statement added.
Finance Services Leaders Appeal for Limited Government Aid to Fight Cyber Attacks - PC Advisor
A group of industry experts representing the financial services industry, an increasingly popular target for cyber criminals, on Friday appealed to members of a House subcommittee for limited government action to help banks and other institutions protect themselves and their customers from the growing breadth and sophistication of online attacks.
Their wish list includes policy changes to facilitate greater sharing of threat information among public- and private-sector entities, stricter law enforcement in the United States and abroad, and a more holistic approach to the policing the Internet ecosystem.
Banks and other financial services firms already have sophisticated cybersecurity mechanisms in place, of course, but even state-of-the-art perimeter defenses can't guard against every threat vector, according to Michele Cantley, senior vice president and chief information security officer with Regions Bank, who testified at Friday's hearing on behalf of the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center. That group counts more than 4,400 members, accounting for the majority of the U.S. financial services sector.
"[C]orporate account takeover attempts cannot be stopped solely by the financial institutions," Cantley said. "All participants in the Internet ecosystem have roles to play. Banks, for instance, have no direct control over the end customers' computers, nor can banks control what emails bank customers open or what websites they visit prior to accessing their online systems."
Cantley concurred with other witnesses in their appeal for removing legal and compliance barriers to sharing threat information, an issue addressed by a bill that recently won approval in the House and awaits consideration in the Senate, where it faces an uphill climb amid competing cybersecurity legislation in an election season. Though they expressed some reservations about privacy and confidentiality concerns in the bill, the witnesses said they broadly supported the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.
But Cantley also told lawmakers that financial firms and others across the public and private sectors need to do more to educate users about safe computing, training them to detect the warning signs of phishing attacks, malware and other threats. Additionally, Cantley suggested that lawmakers could pursue legislation that would give Internet service providers more flexibility to filter out traffic carrying malicious content so that fewer threats would ever make to unsuspecting users' desktops.
Those appeals came with the predictable caveat that industry groups would resist initiatives to impose more prescriptive regulations that would oversee their cybersecurity efforts on a technical level.
Friday's hearing comes amid rising concerns about vulnerabilities not only to individuals transacting with financial institutions, but to the corporate networks themselves. After all, as the notorious outlaw Willie Sutton is said to have quipped when asked why he robbed banks, "That's where the money is," recalled Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee's Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government-Sponsored Enterprises.
"Unfortunately, just as there have been many and numerous instances of identity theft out there, where individuals have credit cards stolen or accounts looted, there has also been a significant rise in corporate account takeovers as well," Garrett said.
But there is an important distinction between the garden-variety denial-of-service attacks perpetrated by hacker collectives such as Anonymous that can knock a site off line—grabbing headlines in the process—and the attacks that can infiltrate the inner walls of critical digital infrastructure such as financial trading platforms or top-secret nuclear systems, said Mark Graff, chief information security officer at NASDAQ OMX.
Graff, who only joined NASDAQ in April, has spent more than two decades in information security, including a recent stint overseeing the defenses at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where nuclear secrets were among the more sensitive assets under his guard.
"I changed industries, but most of the challenges and many of the adversaries remain the same," said Graff, who stressed the need for tiered security that isolates mission-critical assets behind additional firewalls or in distinct network zones, keeping them away from the Internet.
"One key message in both institutions is the isolation of critical systems from the Internet at large. While many of the services we deliver to customers worldwide are housed on Internet-facing Web services, our trading and market systems are safely tucked away behind several layers of carefully arranged barriers," he said. "This is an important distinction to remember, and we should all keep this in mind when you hear about denial-of-service attacks against one institution or another. Any troublemaker can run up to the front door of a house and ring the doorbell over and over again, and that's what most denial-of-service attacks amount to."
Graff said that those attacks, while they might temporarily block consumers from accessing certain websites, are typically nothing more than an act of "vandalism," hardly a sign that anyone has gained entry to the house, by his metaphor.
But even in seeking to remove the sensationalism from the often breathless media coverage of cyber attacks, Graff acknowledged that the threats are very real.
"Effectively, all of the systems represented at this table," he said, "they're all under attack all the time at some level, in contrast to the situation just a few years ago. Today Internet attacks are a little bit like weather. We have a little bit more rain or a little less rain. Sometimes there's a hurricane that comes at us, but generally speaking they're all under attack."
In addition to a more fluid information-sharing framework—a point on which nearly all observers agree— Graff argued that corporate systems could achieve a higher degree of stability if hardware manufacturers and software producers did a better job of building security in at the time of production.
Additionally, he suggested that lawmakers and government officials could dramatically improve the nation's security posture if they took steps to shore up the supply chain for parts that tech companies import from overseas, citing concerns that compromised hardware could provide hostile foreign actors, including those working at the behest of their government, with an entry point into critical U.S. systems.
"The supply chain problem, the threats of supply chain attack, are really, I think, perhaps the knottiest problem, the most serious issue that faces us, and the one that would be most susceptible to help from government," Graff said. "I think it's one where the U.S. government really could make the biggest assistance."
Kenneth Corbin is a Washington, D.C.-based writer who covers government and regulatory issues for CIO.com.
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