Daily update
Daily update
- China announced a growth target of around 5%. China’s officials are strongly motivated to ensure official numbers meet the target, but do investors care? China’s domestic growth rate is more important to global companies (who make goods in China to sell in China) than to the global economy. China’s imports for domestic use are limited in volume. The quality of growth also matters. Were growth to come from increasing the consumer share of the economy, it might have more of a global impact.
- US partisan voters will be voting for some of the presidential candidates in the November election (there will be more than two names on that ballot). Markets already have clear assumptions, so do not care. January factory orders data and final durable goods data are due.
- The UK BRC retail sales data showed slower growth in February. The deflation of durable goods and discriminatory discounting of supermarkets lowered the nominal numbers. The data continues the existing narrative—consumers are fed up with price rises, and may be diverting funds from goods to fun.
- Eurozone producer prices, which best represent pricing power across the corporate sector, are expected to stay in deflation (even excluding energy price effects). This is old news as we already have regional evidence.
