Next Week At A Glance

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This story features WESFARMERS LIMITED.
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The company is included in ASX20, ASX50, ASX100, ASX200, ASX300 and ALL-ORDS

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

The Fed will hold a policy meeting next week and publish a statement on Wednesday night, and Janet Yellen will hold a quarterly press conference at which, as far as everyone is assuming, she will explain why the FOMC raised its funds rate.

Before we get there we have US non-farm payrolls tonight. Forecasts are for in excess of 200,000 jobs to be added which would surely underscore the Fed’s decision, but on the basis of a chorus of Fedhead hints these past couple of weeks, it could be 20,000 and still the Fed will hike. At least, that’s what the markets are currently pricing in.

We can therefore assume Wall Street will only experience volatility if the Fed doesn’t hike. If it does, well that’s monetary policy out of the way for the time being and we can go back to seeing what The Donald is up to. The bottom line there is “a lot”, but nothing that is likely to move the dial until it passes through Congress and becomes actual policy, which could be a long time off.

Presumably Wall Street will continue to meander in the meantime, assuming nothing out of the blue.

US economic data releases next week, that mean nothing much given the Fed meeting, include the CPI, housing sentiment and starts, business inventories, industrial production, consumer sentiment and the Empire State and Philly Fed activity indices.

China will release February industrial production, retail sales and fixed asset investment data.

The Fed meeting will no doubt suck the oxygen away from the Bank of Japan and Bank of England policy meetings, both scheduled for the day after.

In Australia we’ll see NAB’s monthly business confidence survey and the increasingly misleading jobs number.

Wesfarmers ((WES)) will provide an update next week on how things are going with its Bunnings UK rollout and there will be another round of ex-divs across the week, albeit fewer than this week.

Note that the US goes onto summer time over the weekend hence as of Tuesday morning, the NYSE will close at 7am Sydney time through to April.

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