The Week Ahead: 10/12 - 10/16

Monday, October 12

Tuesday, October 13

• Tentative: Federal Budget Balance for Sept.

Wednesday, October 14

• 8:30 AM – Import and Export Prices for Sept.
• 8:30 AM – Retail Sales for Sept.
• 10:00 AM – Business Inventories for Aug.
• ~2:00 PM – FOMC Minutes from Sept. 23 Meeting

Thursday, October 15

• 8:30 AM – Initial Jobless Claims for week ending 10/10
• 8:30 AM – Continuing Jobless Claims for week ending 10/3
• 8:30 AM – CPI and Core CPI for Sept.
• 8:30 AM – Empire State Manufacturing Index for Oct.
• 10:00 AM – Philadelphia Fed Business Outlook Survey for Oct.
• 10:30 AM – Natural Gas Storage for week ending 10/9
• 1:00 PM – Crude Inventories for week ending 10/9

Friday, October 16

• 9:00 AM – Net Long-Term TIC Flows for Aug.
• 9:15 AM – Capacity Utilization and Industrial Production for Sept.
• 9:55 AM – Prelimimary Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index for Oct.
• 9:55 AM – Preliminary Michigan Inflation Expectations for Oct.

My Take

We get off to a slow start this week with a holiday, but have some very important data released in the latter half of the week. Thursday morning is the highlight of the week as either the jobless data or CPI could have a huge impact on all markets.

Things will get very interesting if we get a huge jump in CPI and the inflation concerns start growing at the Fed. The number one question right now in the U.S. economy is deflation or inflation. We’ll be one data point closer to answering that question after this week. Bond market action at the end of last week shows that inflation is a growing concern.

In the equity markets, we get earnings reports this week from Intel, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Bank of America, and GE. Obviously a lot of attention will be paid to the bank earnings and I don’t expect any bad news from them since they have been given every opportunity to turn risk-free profits for the past 12 months.