The week’s main economic event came and went on Wednesday, but Thursday will feature a rush of retail earnings, the second major piece of the economic puzzle this week.
Results expected Thursday include numbers from Kohl’s (KSS), Gap (GPS), and Nordstrom (JWN). The economic calendar will be a bit lighter, with just the weekly report on initial jobless claims and the FHFA home price index set to cross the tape.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Federal Reserve released the minutes from its latest meeting which, on balance, didn’t do much to change market expectations that the Fed will not be raising interest rates in March.
“The minutes to the January FOMC meeting, in our view, provide little new information relative to what we learned from the FOMC statement and Chair Yellen’s recent testimony before Congress on the economic outlook,” writes Barclays economist Michael Gapen.
“Our main take-away is that the monetary policy outlook is still largely based on pre-election assumptions that have been slow to evolve, given the lack of policy details from the administration.”
The sentence that stuck out to some was the Fed saying, “In discussing the outlook for monetary policy over the period ahead, many participants expressed the view that it might be appropriate to raise the federal funds rate again fairly soon if incoming information on the labor market and inflation was in line with or stronger than their current expectations or if the risks of overshooting the Committee’s maximum-employment and inflation objectives increased.” (Emphasis added.)
Markets, again, were little-changed following the release. And as Neil Dutta, an economist at Renaissance Macro, said, “We view the FOMC minutes as a neutral event.”
Myles Udland.
Full story at Yahoo News.
No comments:
Post a Comment