The Week Ahead: Light On Economic Data, Heavy On FOMC Speakers

This week's calendar is an almost perfect complement to Friday's mega rally on the weak Jobs report.  As we said heading into Friday (read it here), the response to NFP was less about traders trading a shift in economic fundamentals and more about traders trading the potential change in Fed policy that results from those lackluster fundamentals.  Now that markets and news media appear to be on the same page regarding Friday's NFP, we're ready to move on to the next phases, which are neatly bundled up for us in the coming weeks.

Beginning with the week at hand, there's very little by way of economic data, with no day containing more than one moderately-important piece of data.  Even then, we'd hesitate to say/think that the sum total of all the week's data would be enough to counteract the ball set in motion by the NFP miss.  So in that sense, a light data calendar is just what we need!  After all, if the data available isn't likely to change the outlook, might as well not expend the time and energy to digest it.  On the other hand, it would be nice to get a bit more clarification on how we should interpret the NFP miss before we trade it.  As it turns out, this is exactly what we'll get.

The current week is all about Fed-Speakers.  Beginning Tuesday, there are Fed speakers every day, and an important one from Bernanke on Thursday.  Here's the run-down, not so much because we'd advocate waiting on the edge of your seat to see what's said, but rather because it's the most efficient way for us to convey how thickly populated the calendar is with Fed speeches (we also threw in the Beige Book, since it's in the same vein as Fed-speak):

Tuesday:

- Bullard at 2:15pm

- Fisher at 7:00pm

- Evans at 7:30pm

Wednesday:

- Lockhart at 8:15am

- Tarullo at 10:00am

- Fed Beige Book at 2:00pm 

- Lockhart at 2:15pm

- Williams at 3:30pm

- Yellen at 7:00pm

Thursday

- Rosengren at 5:45am

- Bernanke at 10:00am

- Lockhart at 11:00am

- Kocherlakota at 1:15pm

- Fisher at 3:30pm

Friday

- Kocherlakota at 8:00pm

This should help provide some of the "fine-tuning" on the bigger picture that markets seem to have inferred on Friday.  Then the following week is immensely active, both in terms of economic data as well as Treasury auctions and Greek elections over the weekend (6/17).  The auction cycle will provide that last week of opportunity to "trade it out" ahead of Greek elections and the FOMC announcement in the week after next (6/20).  Everything is kind of logically building toward a big dose of clarity in the sense that we'll see who Greece elects and what the Fed actually DOES in the course of the next three weeks.