Hi Folks.

Here is the later than usual forecast for this week (I was seriously under the weather Saturday afternoon and all day yesterday).

MONDAY: No news at all (lucky for me).

TUESDAY: A Business Confidence number at 6:00 a.m. eastern time? Yeah, I'll make sure I'm out of bed for that one. (/sarc). We do have a ton of Fed Speak coming our way, including Barr at 9:15, both Powell and Sec.Treas. Yellen at 10:00 (Powell testifying before the Senate and Yellen before the House), and Bowman at 1:30. As noted multiple times previously, trading Fed speeches is tough because we don't know what will be said when, and even how the market will react. It's almost enough to make me take another look at that 6:00 a.m. number. Almost.

WEDNESDAY: Powell is now testifying before the House (10 a.m.) in a replay of yesterday, and historically the markets ignore the second day of those testimonies as they are just a repeat of yesterday. Final Wholesale Inventories are at 10 as well, but that one is a non-starter in terms of price action. Bowman and Goolsbee from the Fed speak at 2:30 p.m. and if that isn't enough, Cook from the Fed speaks at 7:30 p.m. An awful lot of chatter today but not much we can do with any of it. Oh yeah, Crude Oil is at 10:30 a.m. as usual. Great for Crude traders, irrelevant for everyone else.

THURSDAY: Finally! CPI at 8:30 which means trades at 8:30 and 9:30 when the Index markets open. The overall number is expected at .2% and the Core number at .1%. We saw oil prices drive up gas prices late last month but that may not be enough to force the CPI to post anything higher than expected. And with or without my tin-foil hat, I fully believe we are going to see a cavalcade of doctored numbers over the next 4 months as the party in charge tries to convince everyone things just aren't as bad out there as we think they are. Good luck with that one guys. Aside from CPI, which is really the only thing worth watching, we have NatGas at 10:30 and a couple of Fed Clowns later in the day. None of that matters. It's all about the CPI today.

FRIDAY: PPI Day today, following CPI Day like it usually does. Last month, I think it was, we saw those 2 switch places and PPI generated a ton of activity. Now that they are back in order, this one isn't likely to generate much unless the numbers come in way off base from what's expected. If that happens, and they don't track the kind of miss we may or may not see in CPI on Thursday, then we might get a second very busy day. But typically traders exhaust themselves on CPI so PPI more or less comes and goes without a lot of notice. Add in it's Friday in July and you have the recipe for not much happening with this number. 10:00 a.m. brings the Preliminary UofM Inflation Expectations and Consumer Sentiment, which also rarely moves the needle much. Even with that being the final set of numbers for the week it likely won't create much by way of price action.

Jeff