With China celebrating the Lunar New Year and offline until next weekend, and with the US in the usual post-payrolls macro newsflow lull, the markets will have more than enough time to stew in the latest source of contagion fears, namely Europe, the same Europe which until recently was fixed but is broken all over again. The highlight of the week will be Janet Yellen’s semi-annual testimony to Congress where she is expected to confirm she is trapped: either push the market even lower by sounding hawkish, or admit the US is on the verge of a recession and admit policy error.
Here is what else to expect, ironically from DB’s Jim Reid:
It’s a fairly quiet start to proceedings this week with the only data of note in Europe being German industrial production for December and confidence indicators for the Euro area and France. The usual post-payrolls lull in the US means there’s no data due across the pond today.
Tuesday’s highlights include trade reports covering the December month out of both Germany and the UK, while across the pond the January NFIB small business optimism reading is due out, along with the December JOLTS report and wholesale inventories and trade sales data for the same month.
Turning to Wednesday we’re starting in Japan where the latest January PPI numbers are due out. In Europe we’ll get regional industrial production reports for Italy, France and the UK while the sole release in the US in the afternoon is the January Monthly Budget Statement.
It’s a particularly quiet day for data on Thursday with nothing of note in Europe and just initial jobless claims data due in the US.
It looks like we’ll have a busy end to the week on Friday with Euro area Q4 GDP and industrial production, French employment data and German Q4 GDP and CPI all due out. In the US the big focus will be on the January retail sales data along with the first reading for the University of Michigan consumer sentiment print for February and December business inventories data.
Arguably the focus of the week will be away from the data and instead reserved for the aforementioned Fed Chair Yellen’s semi-annual testimony to the House Financial Services on Wednesday and the Senate on Thursday. Also due to speak will be the Fed’s Williams on Wednesday and Dudley on Friday. Meanwhile we’ll also see the attention for the US presidential election move to New Hampshire which is due to hold the first-in-the-nation primary on Tuesday.
Elsewhere, earnings season rumbles on and we’ve got 64 S&P 500 companies set to report including Coca-Cola, Walt Disney and Cisco. In Europe we’ve got 80 Stoxx 600 companies reporting including Total, L’Oreal, Heineken and Nokia.
And the key US events in table format
Source: DB, BofA
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