Good morning, everyone. Concerns over the global mining industry continue to grow after shares in one of the world’s biggest miners Anglo American fell by more than 10% overnight after the company announced a major restructuring plans. Now Anglo American said it will shrink its workforce by 63% or roughly 85,000 people. The firm also plans on selling huge trunks of its operations, consolidated links from 6 to 3 businesses. Anglo American has been forced to restructure due to the collapse of commodity prices which slashed profits. And analysts suggest the other big miners may soon be forced to follow suit.

And speaking of commodity prices, now the price of oil has been hovering at seven-year lows. And this has forced Woodside Petroleum to put its takeover plans on hold. Now in September Woodside had launched a 12-billion bid for the Papau New Guinea based oil and gas company oil search. However, in a statement to the Australian security exchange yesterday, Woodside said it is not pursuing any alternative transactions to combine the businesses. Oil Search board has unanimously rejected the proposal in September, calling the bid highly opportunistic. And those low oil prices as well as that pressure on miners has led to falls on global markets. Now a couple of hours for the close. The Dow’s trading down around 0.8%. The Nasdaq is at 0.1% lower while the S&P 500 is down 0.6%. In London, the FTSE lost nearly 1.5%. Checking commodity prices, West Texas Crude is trading at 38 US dollars a barrel. Tapis Crude is at 42 US dollars a barrel. And gold is trading at 1073 US dollars an ounce. The Australian dollar is currently buying 72 US cents, 66 euro cents and 48 pence sterling.