Economic calendar: Three important releases for today

Summary:

• Canadian inflation and retail sales will be closely watched by traders ahead of the next week BoC meeting

• US existing homes sales likely to slightly decelerate in September

• A few central bankers’ speeches scheduled on Friday

The Friday’s session will not bring any important releases before noon except the current account data from the Eurozone as well as Italy. However, things are going to change later on with three particularly important releases on the calendar.

1:30 pm BST - Canadian inflation and retail sales: After a spike in July Canadian headline inflation moderated in August and a further gradual slowdown is also expected in September. However, even if we are offered subtly lower values compared to these seen in the two prior months, it will be still decent price growth easily justifying another rate hike taking place as soon as next week. Note that the money market assigns almost 80% chances to see such a move in the following week hence one may assume that this rate increase has been almost fully priced in. Headline CPI is slated to come in at 2.7% while the core-common gauge is forecast to stay at 2%. At the same time there will be a retail sales release. Headline sales should remain at 0.3% in monthly terms while core sales excluding auto is expected to decelerate to 0.1% from 0.9%.

3:00 pm BST - US existing home sales: Given that US rates are on the rise one may suspect that the peak in terms of home sales has been already reached, and a gradual slowdown could occur from now on. Basically, we may risk a thesis that the sales peak - both new and existing homes - could have taken place at the end of the past year. Since then we have not topped these levels. The consensus suggests that sales in September slowed down to 5.29 million from 5.34 million in the previous month.

Central bank speakers scheduled for today:

• 5:00 pm BST - Fed’s Bostic

• 5:10 pm BST - BoE’s Carney

• 5:45 pm BST - Fed’s Kaplan