Next Week At A Glance

This story features NATIONAL AUSTRALIA BANK LIMITED, and other companies. For more info SHARE ANALYSIS: NAB

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

It’s D-Day next week on Wednesday (Thursday in Australia), or should that be T-Day? The Fed will begin its December two-day policy meeting on Tuesday and on Wednesday Ben Bernanke will deliver his final policy statement which will or will not announce the commencement of QE tapering. The chairman will then front his last ever press conference to explain the decision one way or the other.

Wall Street is split as to whether tapering will be announced next week or whether March is still the more likely timeframe. If there is no announcement, stocks will likely rally. If there is an announcement, it is yet unclear whether stocks will crash. Has Wall Street already prepared itself? Quite possibly not.

There is much expectation that the very end of the year and the push into January will bring a typical stock market rally. The question is as what the starting point will be given the tapering decision risk. But before we get to that point, there is still a lot else to get through next week.

The US will see the Empire State and Philly Fed manufacturing indices, a flash estimate of the December manufacturing PMI, the CPI, industrial production, housing market sentiment, housing starts and existing home sales. Friday brings the “quadruple witching” expiry of equity derivatives and another revision of the September quarter GDP.

The eurozone will see its flash PMI and the important IFO business and ZEW investor sentiment surveys and the UK will also see its GDP result revised.

New Zealand will release its September quarter GDP result on Thursday.

The Bank of Japan will hold a policy meeting on Friday.

HSBC will publish its flash estimate of China’s manufacturing PMI for December on Monday and Chinese property price data will be released on Wednesday.

It’s a quiet week for Australia economically, in the lead-up to Christmas, the highlight being the release of the minutes of the RBA’s December meeting on Tuesday.

It’s nevertheless a lot busier in corporate terms. Thursday sees the expiry of all December quarter ASX and SFE derivatives and Friday sees the rebalancing of ASX indices. There’s a late burst of AGMs due, including those for National ((NAB)) and ANZ Banks ((ANZ)), Ten Network ((TEN)), Graincorp ((GNC)), which might be sombre, DuluxGroup ((DLX)) and Incitec Pivot ((IPL)). Orora ((ORA)) will spin-off from Amcor ((AMC)) on Wednesday.
 

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