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Markets Wait for Retail Sector Earnings

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We’re taking it slow here at the start of a new trading week, as August continues its long slog of low volumes and vacation perks. The middle of the week will see most of our pertinent earnings and economic reports; currently, we’re free to spend more time considering the impact of last week’s CPI and PPI inflation reports. Markets appear to be attaching cautious optimism to these prints, even as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are trying to fight back from two successive down weeks.

Pre-market futures were in the green but have slid into the red roughly an hour before today’s opening bell. We do expect important economic data to hit the tape, such as Retail Sales and Import Prices for July, the Empire State Index for August and Business Inventories for June, but not until tomorrow. Earnings this week include heavy hitters like Home Depot (HD - Free Report) , Walmart (WMT - Free Report) and Cisco Systems (CSCO - Free Report) , again starting on Tuesday.

This morning, we did get a fresh earnings report from Chinese solar company JinkoSolar (JKS - Free Report) , which outperformed expectations on both top and bottom lines for its Q2: earnings of $3.06 per share ($3.36 adjusted) sped past the $2.08 in the Zacks consensus, on quarterly revenues of $4.23 billion which outperformed the $4.18 billion expected. After a 2019-2020 period with naught but negative earnings surprises, JinkoSolar now has outpaced estimates in nine of its last 12 quarters.

Oner year after the Chips and Science (CHIPS) Act passed through Congress, $166 billion in semiconductor investment has been committed toward national chip-making endeavors. Roughly 50 community colleges have expended study in this field in the past year. Since the start of the Biden administration, more than $231 billion has been invested. As much as fostering a burgeoning electronics industry domestically, generating chips at home also holds many national security benefits, such as creating alternatives should China look to formally annex Taiwan — including giant chip foundry Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM - Free Report) — into its fold.

Over the weekend, Goldman Sachs (GS - Free Report) came out with a note from its economists, led by Jan Hatzius, that they are “penciling in” a first interest rate cut for this cycle sometime in Q2 of next year, even though the note mentioned, “[We] are uncertain about the pace.” Core CPI numbers from last week seemed to solidify the notion that the Fed will not raise interest rates from their current 5.25-5.50% range at their next meeting on September 19-20, and the economists expect the Fed funds rate “to eventually stabilize at 3.00-3.25%.”

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