LON­DON-Fi­nan­cial mar­kets start­ed the new week in op­ti­mistic mood yes­ter­day af­ter stronger-than-ex­pect­ed US hir­ing for Ju­ly con­tin­ued to buoy sen­ti­ment. With lit­tle sched­uled eco­nom­ic news due, last Fri­day's fig­ures show­ing the US econ­o­my adding 163,000 jobs in Ju­ly con­tin­ue to dri­ve sen­ti­ment. Though the fig­ures eased con­cerns over the world's largest econ­o­my, the rise in the un­em­ploy­ment rate to 8.3 per cent pro­vid­ed more ev­i­dence, if any were need­ed, that the re­cov­ery is patchy. The fig­ures were wel­comed af­ter three months when pay­rolls failed to meet ex­pec­ta­tions. The da­ta al­so helped mar­kets clam­ber off lows reg­is­tered on Thurs­day when in­vestors were ini­tial­ly dis­ap­point­ed by com­ments from Eu­ro­pean Cen­tral Bank pres­i­dent Mario Draghi. In Eu­rope, Ger­many's DAX was up 0.7 per cent at 6,913 while the CAC-40 in France rose 0.5 per cent to 3,392. The FTSE 100 in­dex of lead­ing British shares was 0.1 per cent high­er at 5,791.

Wall Street was poised for a sol­id open­ing too with both the Dow fu­tures and the broad­er S&P 500 fu­tures up 0.1 per cent. Al­so help­ing to shore up mar­kets has been a re­assess­ment of Draghi's com­ments last Thurs­day. Though his com­ments fell short of some mar­ket ex­pec­ta­tions, in­vestors have con­clud­ed that Draghi has paved to more in­ter­ven­tion in the bond mar­kets. Span­ish Prime Min­is­ter Mar­i­ano Ra­joy came the clos­est Fri­day to ac­knowl­edg­ing that he has con­sid­ered a sov­er­eign bailout for the coun­try when he told re­porters he would con­sid­er ask­ing for fi­nan­cial aid for his coun­try on­ly once the ECB had fleshed out its cri­sis-fight­ing plans for buy­ing gov­ern­ment bonds. Ra­joy's state­ment and the re­assess­ment of Draghi's ac­tion helped Spain's ten-year yield Mon­day to dip fur­ther be­low the 7 per cent thresh­old that is wide­ly con­sid­ered un­sus­tain­able in the long-run. It's down a fur­ther 0.12 per­cent­age points to 6.71 per cent, hav­ing spiked up above 7 per cent in the af­ter­math of Draghi's com­ments. And the eu­ro was steady hav­ing re­cov­ered the loss­es it post­ed fol­low­ing Draghi's com­ments on Fri­day. It was down 0.2 per cent at $1.2362. (AP)