Weekly Reports | Oct 12 2012
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.
By Greg Peel
Next week all our fears will be revealed. Well, not all of them, given Spain will no doubt torture us for a while yet, but our fears over China will be in the spotlight. It starts tomorrow when China releases its September trade balance, carries on into Monday when September inflation data are released, and culminates on Thursday when September industrial production, retail sales and fixed asset investment numbers come out along with…drum roll…China's September quarter GDP result.
Yes once again those assiduous Chinese will produce in three weeks numbers that will never be revised and that take the rest of the world three months to calculate and are potentially revised again six months later. You've gotta hand it to them.
The US earnings season will also heat up next week, with JP Morgan leading off the bank results tonight, some big tech stocks also in the frame next week and GE posting next Friday. The bottom line is that earnings results per se will not be of great consequence, given forecasts have already been marked down sharply by analysts. More important, as the season rolls on, will be December quarter and 2013 earnings guidance updates. It is these which have Wall Street very worried.
There are a fair few economic releases due in the US next week as well, including the Empire State and Philly Fed manufacturing indices, housing sentiment, housing starts and existing home sales, retail sales, industrial production and inflation.
In Australia we'll see housing finance and investment lending and NAB's business confidence survey summary for the September quarter. We'll also see the minutes of the RBA meeting which gave us a rate cut this month, and the market will be scouring the detail for any specific clues of a Cup Day follow-up.
We've seen a few AGMs taking place over the last couple of weeks for Australian listed companies, but the AGM season shifts up a gear next week before the real flood the week after.
