US NFP and upcoming polls of UK in focus this week - Rabobank

Raphie Hayat, Economist at Rabobank, lists down the key economic events and macro releases from across the globe which will gauge maximum investors attention.

Key Quotes

“Today is Memorial Day in the US (a federal holiday) and US markets will be closed (as will be markets in the UK and China). However, Mario Draghi will give a speech later today before the European Parliament.”

“On Tuesday, we’ll see some US data on personal income and spending (important because consumption is the major driver of the US economy) and consumer confidence. Interesting here is that personal income data is “hard data” while consumer confidence is “soft data”. These have been out of sync in the last few months, with the soft data being more positive than the hard data. One of the two will give – our hunch is going towards the hard data catching up with the soft data (although personal income did disappoint last month with an increase of 0.2% vs consensus of 0.4%). In Europe, we’ll see the PMI’s, Eurozone economic sentiment and German inflation data.”

“There are some Fed speakers on Wednesday. Dallas Fed’s Robert Kaplan will participate in a Q&A session on International Economics in New York City, while San Francisco Fed’s John Williams will speak at the Bank of Korea International Conference. In Europe, we will have unemployment data on Italy and Germany, Q1 GDP growth data on France and perhaps the most important, Eurozone inflation.”

“Thursday, we’ll have some data on the US labour market, with a release from the ADP National Employment Report and Jobless claims. The latter have been trending down since about a year and are at historic lows. On Friday, we’ll see further employment data from the US (non-farm payrolls).”

“Finally, although UK elections will not be until next week, we are likely to see a lot of polls data coming out. In that respect, Theresa May’s lead in polls seems to be narrowing from about 20% a couple of weeks ago to just 5% at the end of last week (according to YouGov polls). Although the disclaimer that polls can be (very) wrong is getting tedious, it is still a valid one to make here.”