What’s on the Agenda for this Week?
Three Things
The three areas that have the greatest ability to impact backend pricing this week are: (1) Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, (2) Coronavirus and (3) Purchasing Managers Indexes (PMIs).
(1) Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: There is a ton of job and wage related data this week. The main focus will be Friday’s Non Farm Payrolls, Average Hourly Earnings and the Unemployment Rate. The stronger the data is, the worse it is for pricing.
(2) Coronavirus: In Europe there is a major resurgence of Covid cases that is being referred to as a “third wave” while here in the U.S. there is a 16% weekly spike in cases despite increased vaccination rates with 63K new daily cases. The expectation is that trend will increase with spring break and could potentially throw a road block into reopenings and push the economic surge to later in the year.
(3) PMIs: With Durable Goods Orders missing last week, Chicago PMI and the ISM Manufacturing PMIs will get a lot of attention both in terms of orders as well as the internals for prices paid and employment.