Next Week At A Glance

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By Greg Peel

Wall Street is squared up and it's all about jobs tonight. Jobs, of course, is all about QE2. With the market already factoring in a level of QE2, and the Fed not due to meet until early November, it's hard to see a particularly sharp move in markets tonight unless the jobs number comes out significantly different to expectations in one direction or the other. Everyone's holding their breath.

Whatever happens tonight, we then move into a week which features US inflation data. The PPI is out on Thursday and the CPI on Friday and the Fed is now targeting deflation in its QE2 proposals. The minutes of the previous Fed meeting are due out on Tuesday which may provide further insight albeit subsequent Fed chatter may render the minutes a little redundant.

The US Treasury budget and the trade balance are also out next week and Friday will also see retail sales. The Treasury will auction US$66bn of three and ten-year notes and thirty-year bonds which, again, will reflect in their yields the world's anticipation of QE2. Notably, the value of Treasury supply is quietly diminishing which adds more air to the bond “bubble”.

And the US earnings season kicks into gear next week with highlights being JP Morgan, Intel, General Electric and Google.

China is back today from its week-long holiday and next Wednesday will release its monthly trade balance.

Australia has a relatively quiet week with attention mostly focused on stocks. The AGM season continues to hot up, and third quarter production reports from the resource sector begin to roll in. Next week sees reports from Energy Resources of Australia ((ERA)) and Rio Tinto ((RIO)).

This weekend in Washington will see the annual meeting of the IMF with finance ministers in attendance. While normally such a meeting would have a wide agenda, and markets would not expect anything too monumental to transpire, this meeting just happens to fall at a time the supposed global Currency War is heating up. Will it be pistols at dawn? 

For a more comprehensive preview of next week's events, please refer to "The Monday Report", published each Monday morning. For all economic data release dates, ex-div dates and times and other relevant information, please refer to the FNArena Calendar.

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