It’s a quiet start to the week but the macro-data release calendar does get busier, particularly in the US with CPI-inflation, retail sales, manufacturing indices and industrial production figures due out. UK GDP for Q1 will be of (passing) interest as will Australian labour market data for April. The RBNZ holds its policy meeting.
Monday 11th May
United States: FOMC member Bostic to speak
Tuesday 12th May
United States: CPI-inflation (August). Core CPI-inflation is expected to have slowed to 1.5% yoy from 2.3% yoy in March as a result of a collapse in demand-pull inflation while headline inflation, also impacted by international oil prices, is forecast to have tanked to 0.4% yoy from 1.5% yoy. In any case inflation data are unlikely to be main driver of Federal Reserve monetary policy at this stage.
United States: FOMC members Harker, Quarles and Mester to speak
Wednesday 13th May
New Zealand: Reserve Bank of New Zealand policy meeting. The RBNZ will in all likelihood keep its policy rate unchanged from its record low of 0.25% but could conceivably expand its QE program and leave the door open to negative policy rates.
United Kingdom: Q1 GDP (preliminary data). There is wide range of forecasts, unsurprisingly given the economic backdrop. The median forecast is for a 2.5% qoq contraction, following on from zero growth in Q4 2019, but the NIESR estimates that the contraction was twice as large at 5.0% qoq.
Eurozone: Industrial output (March).
Thursday 14th May
Australia: Labour market data (April). The domestic economy created a robust 115,000 jobs in November 2019 to March 2020 but these jobs and more were likely lost in April, as has been the case in other major economies. The consensus forecast is that 575,000 jobs were lost in April – a number which would dwarf any other previous monthly employment loss – and that the unemployment rate rose to 8.3% – the high since 1997 – from 5.2% in March.
United States: Initial jobless claims (week till 14th May). The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits for the first time has increased by over 33 million in the past seven weeks and is expected to rise by a further 2.5 million this week.
Friday 15th May
United States: Retail sales (April). The $-value of retail sales fell 8.4% mom in March – already a record monthly collapse – but is expected to have collapsed a further 11.6% mom in April as the national lockdown started to really bite into consumer demand.
United States: New York Fed Empire State manufacturing index (May). One of the first releases of macro data for May.
United States: Industrial output (April).
