Next Week
September 11, 2009
The week to September 18th has scheduled central bank meetings in Japan, Switzerland, Mexico and Turkey and the release of minutes from the last Swedish Riksbank and Bank of England meetings. The Bank of Japan will release a new assessment of the economy and hold its monthly press conference presided over by Governor Shirakawa. At least four Fed officials including Chairman Bernanke speak during the week, and several Bank of England policymakers will be testifying before the British parliament regarding their latest assessment and forecasts.
The U.S. has a thick and rather significant list of planned economic indicators. It includes retail sales; consumer and producer prices; the quarterly current account and monthly Treasury report on capital flows; business and wholesale inventories; housing starts, building permits and the NAHB index; the Empire State and Philly Fed factory indices; the U of Michigan and IBD/TIPP confidence indices; and weekly information on chain store sales, energy inventories, jobless insurance claims, consumer confidence and mortgage applications.
Euroland reports industrial production, labor costs, employment growth, consumer prices, the current account, and trade figures. German producer prices, import prices, and investor sentiment compiled by the ZEW Institute are due, as are French consumer prices, Italian industrial orders, and Dutch and Belgian consumer confidence.
Switzerland announces producer prices and industrial production, while Norway and Sweden chime in respectively with trade data and unemployment.
From Great Britain, market watchers and participants will be sifting though a big batch of new information — consumer prices, unemployment, wage earnings, productivity, retail sales, public finances, M4 credit and money growth, the CBI survey of industrial trends, a survey on attitudes about inflation, and a couple of house price gauges, one from RICs and the other from the DCLG.
Poland announces its PPI, CPI and industrial production. Israel releases GDP, consumer prices and the current account. Retail sales and the PPI are due in the Czech Republic. Brazil and Colombia report retail sales
Japanese figures are due on industrial production, construction spending and the tertiary index for service sector activity. The Reuters monthly Tankan index, which is a good proxy for the BOJ survey, will be awaited keenly, since it is for September and thus should provide a good indication of the central bank’s upcoming release. So will the Ministry of Finance’s survey on corporate conditions and sentiment and the index of leading economic indicators.
Canadian data covering capacity utilization, productivity, unit labor costs, manufacturing trends, wholesale turnover and the index of leading economic indicators could easily be overshadowed by the possibility of a vote of no confidence for Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative government.
There’s not much of significance from the Pacific Rim — housing starts and leaders from Australia, retail sales and factory activity from New Zealand, Hong Kong’s PPI, unemployment rate, and industrial output, Singapore retail sales, Malaysian consumer prices, and South Korean unemployment.
There may be leaked information regarding the upcoming September 24-25 Pittsburgh summit of Group of Twenty political leaders, which follows earlier summits in Washington in mid-November 2008 and London in early April. Because the G-20 includes increasingly influential emerging economies like China and India, it is seen to be usurping the role of the G-7 and G-8, which some currency market observers now consider irrelevant. The problem there is that the G-7 has a mechanism anchored around three pre-arranged annual meetings of its finance ministers and central bank heads that was specifically designed for sharing information about currency market developments and coordinating policies that affect those markets. The second and third of those meetings are coordinated with the semi-annual IMF/World Bank meetings. The next one of those meetings is set for Istambul on October 6-7.
Copyright Larry Greenberg 2009. All rights reserved. No secondary distribution without express permission.
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