August 23: Waiting For Bernanke – Economic Highlights

With the domestic economic calendar on the thin side, the market will likely find today’s manufacturing data coming out of Asia and Europe to be reassuring enough. The Libyan situation remains fluid, but it is increasingly becoming obvious that Qadhafi may not have much time left.

But all eyes are on Bernanke, who will speak about the U.S. economy at the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole confab. Anticipation has been building that he will repeat his performance from last year and lay out the plans for another round of quantitative easing.

China’s manufacturing purchasing managers index (PMI) for August came in modestly better than expected, showing improvement over the prior month’s reading. The composite PMI reading for the Euro Zone also came in better than expected, though it stayed steady at the prior month’s level. Importantly, Germany’s PMI posted decent momentum. The positive aspect of the Chinese and Euro Zone PMI data is not that it is very good. But rather than it could have been quite bad. And that counts for something in these grim times.

With respect to the Bernanke watch, I am not looking for announcement of a new quantitative easing program. What we will get instead is a discussion from the Fed Chief of the different policy options at the central bank’s disposal and their pros and cons. The high inflation readings of recent months make it almost impossible for him to announce another round of easing.

And as we found from the last FOMC meeting, Bernanke does not have all his members onboard with a fresh round of monetary easing. Unless growth and inflation readings drop precipitously in the coming months, all the talk of further easing will likely come to nothing.

On the earnings front, we got a top- and bottom-line beat from H.J. Heinz (HNZ), though rising input costs weighed on the ketchup-maker’s margins. Medtronic (MDT), the largest medical device maker, came out with inline earnings on a modest revenue beat. Results would have fallen short of expectations without positive contribution from foreign exhange effects. In other corporate news, we have share buyback announcements from Lowes (LOW) for $5 billion and Alpha Natural Resources (ANR) for $500 million.

New Home Sales are scheduled for release today at 10:00 AM EST. Our consensus estimate shows this indicator is expected to decrease to 311,000 from the annual pace of 312,000 reported in June.