The pound is trading higher amid more hopeful Brexit murmurs
- UK Times report on Brexit deal - "There's increasing expectation of a deal"
- EU 'thinks Brexit deal 95% agreed' but anxiety remains
The weekend news (⬆) sees a more "positive" spin on Brexit headlines but to sum it all up, there's just some whispers and murmurs that odds are, some deal - however it may shape up to be - is to be reached some time during this week.
BBC's Europe editor, Katya Adler, added to that yesterday in saying that "the general expectation is a deal will be done in the next few days".
However, this is largely the optimists taking a glass half-full approach more than anything else. There is no concrete evidence so far that suggests that things are different from where they were since the start of the year.
Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed on Brexit, so this talk of a 95% agreement being settled is worthless without a compromise on the three key outstanding issues.
There is hope and the mood music surrounding talks is looking more positive, but there's still every likelihood that things could fall apart.
European Commission president von der Leyen also made some remarks over the weekend in saying that:
"After difficult weeks with very, very slow progress now we've seen in the last days in the last days better progress, more movement on important files. We still have, of course, the three main difficult issues, the governance, the fisheries, and the level playing field."
That pretty much sums things up as we head into another round of negotiations this week.
All this talk of "progress" is largely just a spin to buy time in order to resolve the three key outstanding issues. If there is some breakthrough, that would be a massive tailwind for the pound as cable takes aim at 1.3400.
Otherwise, we are likely to see the can kicked down the road again and I firmly believe that at the end of the day, both sides will fall back on some technicality to sell a compromise.
A skinny deal excluding the three key outstanding issues (instead postponing them) will allow Boris Johnson to "technically" stick with a Brexit on 1 January 2021 while the EU doesn't have to move its red lines and be made to look worse off from any deal.
