Markets Await Clues on Fed’s Next Moves as We Enter a Quiet Week For Data Releases

by Chen Zhao

In A Nutshell: The economic calendar is light this week with little new information for markets to chew on. The Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium next Friday will kick off a new round of information that may change the odds of a rate hike at the Sept 16th Fed meeting.

Upcoming Attractions

With few economic data releases on the calendar this week, we will be focusing on Wednesday’s release of the minutes from the last Fed meeting. It had been an unusually dramatic meeting with historically high uncertainty going in. Chair Warsh’s refusal at the press conference to give policy guidance or explain the Fed’s current thinking on inflation led long term rates to drift higher in the days following the meeting. The minutes will be scrutinized for how the other 11 voters on the committee are thinking, specifically how worried they are about inflation staying above target when the most recent readings on the labor market have been weak.

Last Week’s Highlights

Last week brought both the eagerly awaited CPI and PPI inflation reports. Both came in largely as expected and, as a result, forecasters are expecting a mostly benign PCE inflation report at the end of August. There wasn’t enough good news to take the risk of Fed rate hike in September completely off the table, especially because there’s another month of data still to come, but the data did feel like a sigh of relief. Odds of a September hike are now a bit south of 50%.

Last week’s retail sales data for July came in surprisingly weak, but it shouldn’t have much bearing on the market and the Fed’s reading of the economy. For one, the retail sales series does tend to be volatile so single data points are often assumed to be noise. And secondly, Amazon moving Prime Day from July to June this year may account for most of the miss in the data.