Weekly Reports | Feb 25 2011
By Greg Peel
Hallelujah. Next Monday will bring the last overloaded day of Australian profit reports before the earnings season comes to a screaming halt.
Ahead tonight, however, the US will make its first revision of fourth quarter GDP which is expected to result in a tick up from 3.2% to 3.3%. But Wall Street is not paying much attention to data at present, rather is conversely responding to every movement of the oil price, which itself has been responding to every Twitter message coming out of Libya and other developments in the region.
As I write the world is still not sure whether or not Colonel Gaddafi has indeed been shot.
So there's little point in trying to make predictions from here. Let's just say the situation is fluid. In the meantime, next week brings us the latest monthly round of purchasing managers' index data from across the globe. All of Australia, China, the UK, eurozone and US will report manufacturing PMIs on Tuesday and services PMIs begin being reported from Thursday.
Across the week the US will also see the Chicago PMI, pending homes sales, personal income and expenditure, construction spending, vehicle sales, factory orders and the Fed's Beige Book. It is also unemployment week, with the ADP private sector number due out on Wednesday and official non-farm payrolls on Friday.
It's also a big week of economic data in Australia culminating with the release of the fourth quarter GDP on Wednesday. Clues will be provided from releases earlier in the week of quarterly corporate profits, inventories, net exports and current account along with January private sector credit and retail sales.
The RBA will no doubt already know the GDP result when it has a policy meeting on Tuesday but there will be no change to rates. Later in the week we will also see the release of building approvals and the trade balance.
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.
