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Big Week of Economic Data Coming

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Monday, March 28, 2022

We have a big week on tap ahead of us this Monday morning, after a week or so of being fairly rudderless with information to push or pull the market: after the expected mid-month interest-rate hike of a quarter percent, indexes breathed a clear sigh of relief: the Dow and Nasdaq have risen 1500 points or more since then, and the S&P 500 is up +350.

This week, we expect to see fresh results from the Case-Shiller Home Price Report, Consumer Confidence, Job Openings/Quits, ADP private-sector jobs, a revision to Q4 GDP, Weekly and Continuing Jobless Claims, the PCE Price Index, PMI & ISM Manufacturing, Construction Spending and, of course, the ever-important non-farm payroll report and Unemployment Rate. And all this before Q1 earnings season picks up its pace in the coming weeks.

This morning, we see a slight drop in Advance Trade in Goods for February, pulling back from its all-time high (or low, depending) -$107.6 billion to -$106.6 billion. Exports rose +1.2%, led by consumer goods and industrial supplies, while Imports grew by a much milder +0.3%, pulled down by foreign auto imports dragged down nearly -10% on the month. The U.S. trade deficit really got going around the turn of the century; prior to then it was relatively close to breakeven.

We’ve been looking for inversions to the yield curve — which is historically a forward indicator, though not always, of a coming recession — and we finally saw one: the 5-year bond yield went higher than the 30-year for the first time since 2006 (which did, in fact, anticipate the Great Recession). But the main comparison economists make is between 2-year bond yields and 10-year: there, while the flattening continues — 2.31% versus 2.46% — for now the gap is holding. The 10-year yield has grown 30 basis points in the past week.

Pre-market futures are flat-to-negative at this hour: the Nasdaq is riding near-zero ahead of the opening bell, while the S&P is -3 points and the Dow is -30. These economic data points should go a long way to articulate where the economy — including important inflation and employment levels — is headed.

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