Daily update
Daily update
- Another blast of business sentiment opinion polls will be trying to get attention today. European business sentiment has tended to underreport economic reality. The gut instincts of respondents do not necessarily match an objective assessment of the facts. The challenge is that any gains in sentiment might reflect improving reality, but might also reflect sentiment catching up with reality without the real world outlook shifting.
- US sentiment adds to the unreliability of gut instinct with the bile of political partisanship—which raises even more problems in so polarizing a political climate. The Philly Fed survey is due today. There are also revisions to past retail sales numbers—which are interesting to economists, but sadly less exciting for trades in financial markets.
- The UK is offering its fiscal data for March. Because people rarely pay taxes they do not owe, this is a reasonable way of seeing how much economic activity is missed by official data like GDP. Structural change makes old-fashioned metrics increasingly unreliable.
- Both the Bank of England and the ECB have speakers—BoE Chief Economist Pill amongst them. While chief economists are always worth hearing, the tone of central bank comments recently has been rather uninspiring for financial markets.
