10 Things You Need To Know Before The Opening Bell

Matthew Boesler

 Oct. 9, 2012

AP

Good morning. Here's what you need to know.

• The Nikkei fell 1 percent in overnight trading after exchanges were closed Monday, while the Shanghai Composite jumped 2 percent. European stocks were mostly in the red, with Spain down 0.9 percent and the German DAX down 0.4 percent. U.S. stock futures were flat.

• German chancellor Angela Merkel visits Greek prime minister Antonis Samaras in Athens today. Massive austerity protests will be staged across the city by the country's biggest labor unions in response to Merkel's visit.

• Greece's official sector creditors – the IMF, EU, and ECB – are having trouble agreeing with each other over how to provide additional aid to Greece. The IMF would like to see the EU take a debt writedown, but is not willing to accept a writedown on its own holdings of Greek debt.

• The IMF cut its global growth forecasts to 3.3 percent in 2012 from 3.5 percent and 3.6 percent in 2013 from 3.9 percent. The fund cited "alarmingly high" downside risks and said the chance of sub-2 percent global growth are 1 in 6.

• The contraction in U.K. industrial production accelerated to -1.2 percent this month against expectations of a 1.1 percent decline. Manufacturing also contracted 1.2 percent against expectations of a 0.7 percent decline.

• The International Energy Agency will release an in-depth study Tuesday predicting a boom in Iraq's oil industry. The report says Iraq's oil output will double by 2020 and by 2030, Iraq will be the world's second-largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia.

• The PBOC injected a near-record $42.14 billion of liquidity into its financial system on Tuesday. The liquidity injection is the second-largest daily dose of liquidity China's central bank has ever undertaken.

• Mitt Romney has now taken the lead in the U.S. presidential election race over Barack Obama, according to the latest Pew poll. 

• North Korea claimed Tuesday that it had deployed missiles within striking distance of the United States. The verbal provocation follows a defense pact signed between the U.S. and South Korea that allows the latter to upgrade the range of its own missile systems to include all of North Korea.

• A new report from the Institute for Science and International Security suggests that Iran could be 10 months away from possessing a nuclear weapon. However, the report also says that the U.S. would be able to detect when Iran had made significant progress on such a weapon.