Back in 1966 the 73-year-old Mao Tse Tung (for that was his name in the olden days when he lived in Peking) went swimming in the Yangste river to show how clean it was. He was accompanied by 500 guards and an official photographer. President Obama liked the idea. Today's papers carry a photo of him swimming with his daughter in what purports to be the Gulf of Mexico. He is visibly not choking or covered in oil. Unfortunately, the press were not allowed to watch; only the secret service and an official photographer were there to witness his survival. A far bigger audience was present on Friday to observe the survival of the president's favourite currency. The dollar firmed against just about everything except the yen. Although most of the US statistics worked in its favour the bulk of the dollar's gains came before their release. Retail sales rose by 0.4% in July, slightly less than the 0.5% that analysts had predicted but with the advantage of an upward revision, from -0.5% to -0.3%, of the previous month's number. Consumer Price Index inflation speeded up slightly from 1.1% to 1.2%. The University of Michigan's consumer confidence index improved (provisionally) by nearly two points to 69.6, a better result than the market had expected. There were also better than expected figures from Euroland. Nobody could match the exceptionally strong 2.2% growth of German gross domestic product in the second quarter of the year but there were some good efforts. French GDP expanded by 0.6% and the euro zone as a whole managed 1.0% growth. Both were ahead of forecast. Why then did the euro fall and the dollar rise after those results came out? The sensation on the street was that it was Germany, with its 2.2% growth, doing all the work in Europe while the rest of the continent enjoyed its holidays. There is still a lurking fear among investors that German voters could rebel against the continual demands upon them to bail out their more profligate cousins. If that is a genuine risk the situation will not have been helped by stories of non-solidarity last week. Spain's Prime Minister Zapatero said he may relax his country's austerity stance, in order to help the economy recover. Slovakia's parliament voted not to join in with the Greek bailout. Prime Minister Iveta Radicova, whose government has been in power for just a month, said 'poor countries shouldn't pay for the profligacy of richer peers.' Slovakia's contribution to the bailout would have been tiny. Its decision not to play will hardly change the big picture but it makes investors wonder what would happen if larger nations opted out. Were Germany to adopt such a tough stance the whole scheme - and the euro - would be right royally stuffed. There is not a great deal on today's official agenda likely to change that perception. The only Euroland data are those for the consumer price index and the current account. The headline inflation number is expected to have risen from 1.4% to 1.7%. Figures released overnight were not directly applicable to the euro but did have implications for global growth. Japan's economy slowed almost to a standstill in the second quarter, with GDP growing by just 0.1%. Analysts had expected a halving in the speed of growth from 1.2% to 0.6%; the number they got was a severe disappointment and sent the Japanese yen higher. (Come on, keep up; if Japan's economy is slowing it is bad news for global growth, bad news for the commodity currencies and good news for the safe-haven yen.) (It is not necessary to agree with the argument, it is enough simply to accept that a lot of investors think that way.)

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