10 February 2012 at 9:08 GMT
It is another day in the Greek farce with European finance ministers now withholding aid until the beleaguered country agrees to and implements austrerity measures. Meanwhile data from the UK and US should be enough to keep us going today.
- UK PPI set to ease (09:30 GMT): Clearly inflation is not at the top of the list of things to worry about at the Bank of England at the moment as evidenced by yesterday's GBP 50 billion increase in quantitative easing. While inflation has been rather resilient in the face of an economic slowdown we are seeing such signs and today's PPI report should be no exception. Consensus looks for an increase of 0.1 percent month-on-month in January, which would bring the annual growth rate down to 3.7 percent from 4.8 percent previously.
- US trade data to give more clues on GDP revisions (13:30): As mentioned in yesterday's story on wholesale inventories, some of the components of the initial 4Q'11 GDP report were estimated, including inventories and trade data. Hence today's report could give further clues as to any revisions; the revision of wholesale inventories will probably add a tenth or two to GDP growth. Consensus looks for a widening deficit in December to USD 48.5 billion from 47.8 billion a month earlier.
- Consumers' sentiment still low in the US (14:55): The confidence of American consumers has rebounded since the August debt ceiling debacle, but the Conference Board Consumer Confidence series nevertheless declined for the first time in four months in January. Today the more timely University of Michigan Confidence report will give us more clues about the state of mind of US consumers. Consensus looks for unchanged sentiment, i.e. 74.8 from 75.
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