It is set to be a very quiet day in terms of data releases. Worth keeping an eye on is German industrial production in March, which we expect declined modestly after two strong monthly increases. Note that German factory orders released yesterday surprised on the upside compared with our expectations and point to a strong end to Q1 for German business activity.
In the US, we get the NFIB small business optimism indicator for April. Business optimism soared after the election of Donald Trump as president. However, given the increased uncertainty about how much of his policies he will actually be able to carry out in practice, business optimism seems to have peaked and we expect it to fall further given the fall observed in, for example, ISM and PMI. This should not be a significant turn for the worse in the overall economy, but a correction in soft indicators to be more in line with the actual economic development.
Again today there are a few speeches by FOMC members including Rosengren (non-voter, hawkish) and Kaplan (voter, dovish). The focus remains on getting more insight about how the members' views differ after the less informative FOMC statement released last week.
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