A blog story written yesterday on the imminent failure of a US bank was picked up by the FT’s blog and given new life, but it appears to be rubbish. A US bank failure could certainly happen but with the regulators camped out in every bank conference room across the country, it would not happen in an uncontrolled manner.

Markets await US jobless claims data in 45 minutes. There has been dramatic improvement in recent weeks so an uptick seems probable. The market expects claims to rise 9k to 610k today.