Daily update
Daily update
- After last week’s flurry of central bank decisions, we now have assorted central bankers giving more detail on their views. The Bank of England’s Mann is on the calendar today. Mann has been a fairly consistent policy hawk, and yet she switched her vote to “unchanged” last month. Details on what caused that shift will be interesting.
- Federal Reserve’s Bostic is also speaking. Bostic has been suggesting only one rate cut is needed this year—just one rate cut would leave debt increasingly unaffordable for consumers as income growth would then fall faster than interest rates.
- US new home sales data is worth a glance. The sales are expected to be more or less where they were in 2018 and 2019. This hints at a decline in interest rate sensitivity in the US economy. Housing is traditionally an interest rate sensitive area, and yet sales are the same as in a period with far lower real and nominal rates.
- Spanish February producer price inflation may get some attention, just because any inflation data is something of a market obsession at the moment. The UK CBI distributive trades survey is only survey evidence, but the UK consumer is likely to contribute to future positive UK GDP growth revisions.
