Barclays trading desk on Wall Street. (Photo: REUTERS)
While U.S. securities markets are closed Monday for the Presidents’ Day holiday, the week’s upcoming economic calendar is filled with data. Markets and analysts will be eying a housing report, a key inflation gauge and the contents of minutes from last month’s Federal Reserve meeting.
A report on January housing starts is due Wednesday, which is expected by most to show a slight gain year-over-year. A year ago, economists were blaming the weak housing construction data on severely harsh weather in much of the country. In reality, the U.S. construction sector has been suffering in both cold and warm seasons.
The Producer Price Index (PPI), which will also be released Wednesday, is a key measure of inflationary pressure that gauges prices at the producer level before they are passed along to the consumer.
Inflation is being closely watched by the Fed, who has set a 2 percent target rate relating to the timing for raising interest rates. Inflation has remained stubbornly out of the Fed’s target range, fueled by stagnant to non-existent wage growth in a primarily low-paying, part-time job creation environment. With demand curtailed, consumer prices have remained low overall, excluding health care, rents and other necessity goods.
Wednesday the markets will also digest the minutes from the Fed’s policy-setting Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) meeting in January. The Fed’s public statement on that meeting was widely viewed as a mixed bag, somewhat vague and contradictory. While the policy makers on the FOMC cited “solid” growth in the U.S. economy, they repeated their December statement, which claimed we must remain patient while they decide when is the proper time to raise interest rates.
Investors, analysts and corporations hope the minutes will provide some insight into the timing and trajectory of rate hikes, which is believed likely in mid-2015.
