Weekly Reports | Aug 24 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
As the last two sessions on Wall Street have shown, markets just can't help themselves but play the backwards-forwards speculation game with regard to central bank action as we continue to sit out this agonising time gap between Draghi's hints at the last ECB meeting and the ECB meeting to come, as well as the gap to the next Fed meeting. Wall Street has run itself up to previous highs and now, unsurprisingly, the first movers are taking profits.
Volumes remain pathetic and are expected to remain so up to the Labour Day long weekend in the US (September 3) which marks the end of the summer vacation period. The time gap has provided the perfect opportunity for a break and as soon as everyone's back, all hell will begin to break loose on the central bank headline front.
Before that it's probably not even worth worrying about day to day stock movements which are unlikely to be significant ahead of next month. From the micro level, Australia has the last week of earnings results to contemplate next week before the curtain closes on Friday.
Tonight the Spanish government will discuss whether it will or won't approach the ECB for a bail-out. It is not clear whether a decision will be made tonight but if it is it will be significant. No means bad because it means the ECB won't act and thus Yes means good.
The Fed's symposium at Jackson Hole begins on Thursday night and continues into the Friday night. Bernanke will make a speech as tradition dictates, but will he also stick to recent tradition in announcing a new monetary policy objective? The jury's out. He also may prefer to wait to see what happens in Europe and save up any changes for the actual FOMC meeting mid-month. Either way, all eyes and ears will be on Wyoming late next week.
US data to flow in the meantime include durable goods tonight, and next week pending home sales and the Case-Shiller index, the Richmond Fed index, personal income and spending, chain store sales and factory orders. The Fed's Beige Book is out on Wednesday and the June quarter GDP estimate will be revised.
It's a busy earnings report week for Australia but a quieter economic data week, with building approvals and private sector credit the highlights later in the week. We will, however, see one of the most important inputs to the June quarter GDP result and to RBA policy in the form of June quarter private sector capex and capex intentions, released on Thursday.
