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

Consensus forecasts are for tonight’s US November non-farm payrolls report to show 200,000 new jobs added, and if this is the case the Fed will hike in December. But for the past few months, forecasts have been mostly way off the mark. Could a low number derail the hike?

Unlikely, not unless it is ridiculously low, and even then the Fed (a) would probably suspect statistical noise and assume a revision the following month anyway and (b) has seemingly already decided to raise no matter what, despite insisting the decision remains “data dependent” at this last stage. To not raise would be to lose all credibility, and no hike likely would create the sort of market volatility, driven by uncertainty, the Fed is trying to avoid in the first place.

OPEC holds a regular six-month meeting tonight at which, typically, production quotas are reset. But it was this meeting last year that set off the big plunge in the oil price when Saudi Arabia decided not to defend the price through cutting its own production, given US shale was the reason for oversupply.

Saudi Arabia is now pumping out as much as it can sell, and while the oil rig count in the US has fallen, US crude inventories have still risen for ten weeks in a row. OPEC members may tonight well talk about a possible production cut down the track but not now, and even it a production cut were announced, never in OPEC history have members ever stuck to those quotas.

But strap in for an oil price surge were cuts to be announced.

The focus next week will return to China. Across the week Beijing will release November trade, inflation, retail sales, industrial production and fixed asset investment numbers.

A quieter week economically in the US leaves really only Friday’s retail sales number to sway the Fed, if at all it can, with inflation data due out the following week.

In Australia we’ll see ANZ job ads, the NAB business and Westpac consumer confidence surveys and our own jobs report.

The AGM season is now over bar the shouting but stragglers do include the banks. Westpac ((WBC)) meets on Friday while National Bank ((NAB)) will provide a UK update on Tuesday. Market darling du jour (et tous les jours) CSL ((CSL)) will host an R&D update on Thursday.

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