Daily update
Daily update
- The drone of central bank speak dominates the calendar again. ECB President Lagarde is speaking, but markets are unlikely to care. Federal Reserve President Williams is another matter—Williams represents a voice of intellectual economic leadership at the Fed.
- US Fed Chair Powell and former Fed Chair Bernanke are sharing a stage today. Sadly, this is not an economists’ Thunderdome, where two Fed Chairs enter and only one may leave. Bernanke is very unlikely to do anything so crass as criticise their successor. Bernanke’s time at the Fed was marked by new thinking on central bank policy. Powell’s time at the Fed has been marked by a wild chant of “hike, hike, hike”.
- Japanese national consumer price inflation for April behaved as expected. Using international definitions, the core rate ticked up slightly to 2.5% y/y. Japan’s inflation pattern differs from the US and parts of Europe, with less Japanese consumer durable goods disinflation after a later reopening, but greater resistance to profit-led inflation muting the third inflation wave.
- German producer price data was made messy by revisions. The consensus is also not much of a guide, being a wide range of seemingly random guesses. However, the yearly increase in producer prices is at the lowest rate for two years.
