Last night we eventually saw Michel Barnier ousted as Prime Minister as he lost the no-confidence vote after his attempt to push through his social security policy came up against huge resistance in the French Parliament. This has left France in political turmoil and now face the potential of having deadlock in parliament, as the earliest Macron can call an election is July, and the next Prime Minister will ultimately face the same backlash as Barnier.

This morning The Euro has continued to be under pressure ahead of the no-confidence vote against the French Prime Minister Michel Barnier. Lawmakers are set to begin debating the social security element of the budget in Paris at 4pm, with the actual voting to commence shortly afterwards. Current sentiment is pointing towards Barnier losing the vote, after he used a constitutional clause to force through his budget without putting it through a vote.

France voted against prime minister Michel Barnier’s budget yesterday – now leaving months of political uncertainty again. It’s not the first time this year we have seen political chaos in France. Looking back to the summer months when there was a vote of no confidence against President Macron – splitting the government. Officials are now saying that prime minister Michel Barnier will have to step down tomorrow.

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Overnight, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand cut their interest rates by 50 basis points, bringing their rates down to 4.25%. Surprisingly the New Zealand Dollar rose by almost 1% off the back of this, mainly due to initial expectations of a 75-basis point cut. In the press conference afterwards, Governor Adrian Orr crucially left the door open for another 50-basis point cut in their next meeting, February 2025.

Tuesday starts off with a speech from ECB (European CentralBank) member Elizabeth Mccaul at 10am. Could we hear something that willindicate a more detail plan for ECB moving forward with their monetarypolicies? Overall, EUR has been outperformed in the last couple of weeks – particularto the USD.

Last week ended on a weaker note for Sterling, following weak PMI data and weak retail sales numbers. This led to lower exchange rates againstboth the Euro and the Dollar. This week is the last week of the month going into the Holiday weekend in the U.S, so we do expect some profit taking going into the weekend, but before that, we do have some releases of interest, there are no high priority releases for the UK so we could have a pretty stable week for Sterling exchange rates.

Economic indicators all point to Portugal continuing to outperform its European neighbours over the coming years – further fuelling a wave of inward investment from wealthy expats.