Next Week
May 11, 2012
An interest rate meeting is scheduled next week in Iceland, and the FOMC releases minutes from its last meeting. EU finance ministers meet Monday and Tuesday, and the G7 leaders hold their annual summer summit at Camp David on Friday and Saturday. Important state elections in Germany’s most populous region, North Rhine Westphalia, are set for May 13, and German and Swiss markets will be closed Thursday in observance of Ascension Day.
Scheduled U.S. economic indicators arriving next week include the CPI index, the Empire State and Philly Fed manufacturing indices, retail sales, the National Association of Home Builders housing index, housing starts and permits, industrial production, capacity unilization, the index of leading economic indicators, business inventories, the Treasury’s capital flow data, and the usual assortment of weekly measures such as jobless insurance claims, mortgage applications, chain store sales, consumer comfort, and energy inventories.
Many countries will be reporting first-quarter GDP. Many of these are in Euroland. Investors will learn the growth rate of the bloc as a whole as well as for participating countries such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Portugal, and Finland. Some the other GDP reports next week will be made by Japan, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Mexico and Malaysia.
In addition to GDP, Japan releases corporate goods prices, machinery orders, the tertiary index, revised industrial production, capacity usage, and consumer confidence. Hong Kong and South Korea announce unemployment, while Singapore will report on retail sales and trade.
Euroland’s data calendar has the ZEW index of investor sentiment, consumer prices, the trade balance, and industrial production, plus German wholesale prices and producer prices, French, Finnish and Italian consumer prices, Finnish and Dutch retail sales and current account, and Irish, Spanish and Dutch trade.
British labor statistics are due, and so are Swiss consumer and producer prices, Denmark’s PPI, and Norwegian trade numbers.
Canada releases auto sales, consumer prices, wholesale turnover, the monthly survey of manufacturing trends, and flows generated by transactions in securities with non-residents. Mexico reports industrial production as well as GDP.
From Australia arrives home and investment loans, the labor cost index, consumer confidence, expected inflation and motor vehicle sales. New Zealand releases both retail sales and producer prices, and South Africa will be reporting wholesale and retail sales. Turkish unemployment has a scheduled release.
The week overlaps the middle of the second quarter, meaning that 3/8ths of calendar 2012 will have come and gone. It’s been a year of waiting for important areas of uncertainty to get cleared up, but little in that regard has yet happened.
Copyright 2012, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved. No secondary distribution without express permission.
ShareThis
