Australian interest rates and jobs report dominate this week, to the exclusion of other events here and offshore.
Nothing in the US, Europe or Asia will quite influence the thinking of investors large and small than the two key events this month for Australia.
The Reserve Bank board meeting won’t touch interest rates at today’s meeting – that is a given.
But watch the post meeting statement for more clues as to the bank’s future thinking, there may be a couple of small changes.
And then there’s Thursday’s jobs report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and whether there will be any revision downwards of the very high 121,000 new jobs reported for August.
There could be, but there could also be no change because of the quirks of statistics. No one quite knows, except an estimated 10,000 or so new jobs are expected to have been created last month.
But the key will be if there is any readjustment of the August figure.
Yesterday we had the ANZ job ads report for September which showed the 4th monthly rise in a row.
There are a couple of important sets of figures out this week besides the jobs report.
The most important of the others will be the housing finance data on Friday which will provide more evidence about the strength of demand for housing finance from investors, especially self managed super funds.
There will be the odd result and annual meeting. The Bank of Queensland releases its 2013-14 results on Thursday.
While analysts are looking for a higher profit, they also want to know who will replace the departed CEO Stuart Grimshaw.
There are a couple of shareholder meetings this week – the most important will be Australian Foundation Investment Co in Melbourne tomorrow.
In the US, the minutes of the last Fed meeting will be released and will be examined to see if there was anything not covered in all the post meeting publicity last month.
The data flow this week in the US is pretty minor.
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank hold their annual meetings in Washington at the end of this week. Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey is attending.
The update World Economic Outlook will also be released this week with new forecasts for the world’s major economies.
US third quarter earnings start with Alcoa, Monsanto, Yum, Pepsi Co, Safeway and Costco reporting over the next few days.
The Bank of Japan meets with an interest rate decision to be released after the discussions.
Current account data and machinery orders numbers are out in Japan.
Samsung and a couple of other leading Asian groups will release earnings reports.
But Samsung will be the most important after it earlier warned about the likelihood of weaker earnings.
Industrial production numbers for a number of European countries are the highlights in the Eurozone this week.
Industrial production data are also due out in the UK tonight, our time, followed by the latest GDP estimate from the National Institute of Economic and Social research.
Industrial production numbers will be published in Germany tonight, our time.
Industrial production numbers are released in France, Greece and Italy on Thursday night, our time.
And the Bank of England meets Thursday night, and while a decision on a rate rise is not expected, more and more analysts feel there could be some sign from the meeting about the timing of the increase.
