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

May Day Holidays mean this month sees a staggered release of global PMIs, with Beijing reporting official numbers today along with manufacturing for Australia and Japan and the UK and US tonight, the eurozone on Monday, and HSBC’s China numbers on Wednesday. Service sector PMIs are similarly staggered next week, with the UK taking its May Day holiday on Monday.

Because the first of the month has fallen on a Friday, we find ourselves in the unusual position next week of Australia’s jobs numbers coming out ahead of the US result. It’s a busy week, economically for both centres.

The US will see factory orders, the services PMI, the trade balance, March quarter productivity, chain store sales, consumer credit and wholesale trade along with the ADP private sector jobs numbers on Wednesday and non-farm payrolls on Friday.

China will release its trade balance on Friday.

Australia will see ANZ job ads, the TD Securities inflation gauge, building approvals, the services PMI, the trade balance, retail sales, and the jobs numbers on Thursday. The RBA will release a quarterly Statement on Monetary Policy on Friday but the big event of the week will be the RBA’s policy meeting on Tuesday.

Will they or won’t they?

The banks have taken a beating this week and next week sees the half year result season, with all of Westpac ((WBC)), ANZ Bank ((ANZ)) and National Bank ((NAB)) reporting, Commonwealth Bank ((CBA)) providing a quarterly update and Macquarie Group ((MQG)) reporting its full-year.

News Corp ((NWS)) will provide a quarterly result, Woolworths ((WOW)) will hold a strategy day, and BHP Billiton ((BHP)) will hold an extraordinary general meeting for which the matter at hand is the proposed South32 demerger.

The AGM season for calendar year reporters also hots up next week.
 

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