The coming week will be the busiest and most important 5 days of the year, if not decade. It is a “huge week” for investors with the election, a Fed decision, 128 S&P earnings, October payrolls, ongoing pandemic lockdowns and a ton of economic data all due.

“Whichever way you look at it, this coming week will be huge for U.S. and global markets,” said Simon Ballard, chief economist at First Abu Dhabi Bank PJSC. “We see the potential for a sharp rise in volatility around these events — and all in the context of a still deteriorating Covid-19 situation across much of the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.”

Starting with the pandemic, as DB’s Jim Reid writes this morning, Europe is facing up to a harsh winter ahead. The question to be asked to all the European countries is can they come out of these measures in some form towards the end of November/early December as is hoped or will they be extended further. The hit to the U.K. economy which just announced a new round of lockdowns will be softened by an extension of the furlough scheme but that will only add more to the debt. The hope everywhere is that well before the winter/spring peak virus season is over we’ll have the start of a vaccine program or more realistically in the near term a huge advance in rapid result testing. The latter has to be the greatest hope of restrictions being eased before a vaccine has mass rollout. Meanwhile, overnight Bloomberg reported that Italy might tighten restrictions further today with PM Conte wanting more localised curbs depending on virus transmissions – something some regional authorities are resisting.

Covid aside, of course the top event this week be tomorrow’s US election off the front pages for the next few days: 93.29 million have already voted so far, which is 67.7% of 2016’s total, and as Reid notes, “It’s fair to say markets could look very different on Wednesday morning as a “Blue Wave”, if it happens, should get the stimulus junkies hungry to buy and a divided government could remind people of the long winter ahead. So a very big week.”