May 10, 2021 - This week may be an interesting one for markets. While there’s no major report at the level of last week’s Employment Situation Report, there is some interesting data scheduled to be released this week.
We’re also going to get a lot more earnings reports, and while we’re past most of the big names and high-volume days, there’s still a lot of information coming out about business conditions and how individual companies are performing.
Tomorrow’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS) report, which dates to March, may help provide some additional information about the state of the Labor market. While this report covers March, compared to last week’s report that covered April, changes in the number of job openings tend to happen before changes in employment, so the data will likely still be useful. A big drop in openings will suggest companies have slowed the pace of hiring, while an increase in openings will suggest April’s weak payroll number was caused by something else.
Wednesday will bring data about another running theme in economic commentary recently, inflation. The Consumer Price Index is likely to have a headline number well above the Federal Reserve’s stated target, but economists currently expect the “core” number to so an annualized increase of just above 2%.
The core number takes out things like costs for food and energy. Focusing on core inflation isn’t meant to discount the importance of those items in a consumer’s budget, but is instead trying to take out “noisier” data to give us a better picture of what’s actually going on.
Remember how oil prices briefly traded in negative numbers early in the pandemic? Consumers didn’t get paid to fill up their tanks, and in fact, didn’t even benefit much from low prices as they occurred near the low point for people driving last year.
We’re seeing some of the opposite effect now as production and shipping issues have led to shortages for some commodities that have caused price spikes that seem unlikely to be long lasting.
Friday we’ll get a couple of good indicators about how consumers are feeling in retail sales and consumer sentiment. High readings on both of these will likely signal that the recovery is still in good shape, regardless of what last week’s employment numbers looked like.
Economic Events this Week
Tuesday- 10:00 a.m. - JOLTS - Job Openings
Wednesday
- 8:30 a.m.- Consumer Price Index
- 10:30 a.m.- EIA Crude Oil Inventories
- 8:30 a.m. - Initial Claims
- 8:30 a.m. - Producer Price Index
- 8:30 a.m. - Retail Sales
- 10:00 a.m. - University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment - Prelim