Next Week At A Glance

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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

The froth and bubble of global QE is all well and good and while economic data provide the indicators, they are merely a bridge to the real world – that of actual corporate earnings. Tonight the US earnings season kicks off in earnest and hits its straps next week with the big banks, tech stocks and various other Dow components reporting.

After JP Morgan (Dow) and Wells Fargo tonight, next week we’ll see Dow components Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, American Express, Bank of America, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Verizon and General Electric along with Goldman Sachs, Yahoo, Google and Morgan Stanley. Wall Street is quietly optimistic given earnings forecasts have been knocked down quite substantially in the lead-in, suggesting the potential for upside surprise.

But with US indices at all-time highs, QE or no QE, the results had better be sufficient.

Across the globe next week, things are set to get busy-busy. We can start with China’s June quarter GDP release on Monday along with monthly production, sales and investment data, and add in a welter of UK data releases over the week along with the minutes of the last Bank of England meeting that supposedly went close to more QE. The eurozone’s influential ZEW survey is also due.

There’ll be a lot going on in the US amidst the earnings reports, with retail sales, industrial production, inflation, housing sentiment and housing starts all due along with the Empire State and Philly activity indices and the Conference Board leading index. On Wednesday the Fed’s Beige Book is released and Ben Bernanke begins a two-day regular testimony to Congress.

The minutes of the last RBA meeting will be the highlight of Australia’s economic week in which we should find clues about whether Glenn Stevens has really missed his vocation as a stand-up comedian or not.

On the local stock front, the resource sector quarterly production report season is upon us as Perseus ((PRU)), Rio Tinto ((RIO)), BHP Billiton ((BHP)), Gindalbie ((GBG)), Iluka ((ILU)), PanAust ((PNA)), Fortescue ((FMG)), Woodside ((WPL)) and Santos ((STO)) all step up to the nameplate.

The production report season will shortly morph into the local profit result season, just as the US season is tailing off. Pretty soon we’ll know just how things are really travelling.

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