The Day Ahead: Fed Speak And Economic Data Begin Ramping Up

While the day ahead does indeed include a greater number of Fed speakers--all of whom are FOMC voters and speaking mostly during open market hours (y'day's Fed speak was comprised of FOMC non-voters and 2/3rds outside market hours)--to also claim that "economic data begins ramping up" requires a bit of a caveat. 

The only major economic release of the morning is the Productivity and Costs report at 8:30am.  That's an unfortunate time-slot and herein lies the caveat: European Central Bank (ECB) Pres. Mario Draghi will, at the same time, incept the news conference following the ECB policy announcement taking place at 7:45am.  It's unfortunate because if markets are moving as a result of the ECB announcement/conference, some lookers-on might infer causality from the domestic data (not unfortunate in a tragic sense, but it's always good to give credit where credit's due, probably...).  Thankfully, the market-moving snippets that we sometimes get from Draghi tend to arrive in randomly spaced increments as the questions are answered, making it easier to discern the market's focus.

There's plenty of Fed-speak to digest as well.  Non-voters Fisher and Evans basically cancelled each other out yesterday (one wants more QE like he wants the sun to rise, the other is terrified by such reckless money-printing hippies, neither are 100% right and we wish they'd figure that out) while Bullard balanced it out with a warm bowl of 'maybe,' saying the Fed could wait and see whether the recently lackluster data is a new trend or false alarm, and pocket the lower yields thanks to Europe in the meantime.  Order your "MAYBE! 2012" T-shirts now.

Hopefully the "maybe's" can be whittled down to an either hotter or colder consensus on whatever bowl of QE porridge awaits markets with the June 20th announcement.  The heavy clue-gathering period is beginning now with the 4 FOMC voters speaking today, the Beige Book report that the Fed will peruse in conjunction with that June 20th Announcement, and of course, Bernanke congressional testimony tomorrow morning at 10am.  The latter really seems like the domestic focal point of the week, but in terms of market moving potential, today is at least less of a slouch than the first two days of the week.  We stand a better chance of seeing data and events move markets as opposed to tradeflows, even if a lot of that potential energy emanates from the other side of the Atlantic.