Powell's testimonies, home sales data, earnings: What to watch this week - Yahoo Money
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From Jerome Powell's Senate testimony to initial jobless claims, there's a lot to watch this week around the world of finance. Yahoo Finance's Josh Schafer breaks down what to watch in the week ahead. JULIE HYMAN: Well, from J. Powell's house testimony tomorrow to initial jobless claims, Thursday, we've got a lot to watch this week. Yahoo Finance's Josh Schafer is here to give us full breakdowns. So it's a busy shortened week here. JOSH SCHAFER: Yeah, it's a fun shortened week, Julie. So I want to start with the economic calendar first. And of course, when we're talking econ calendar, we're often talking about-- is the economy expanding? Are we finally starting to see a little bit of that slowdown? And what does that mean for the Fed? So we're getting a little bit of a taste of everything with that this week. We started with positive news out of the housing market when you get that homebuilder confidence was better than expected yesterday. Housing starts a giant beat on that this morning. So we've seen positive news for housing. And then, the question is always, again, what does this expansion mean in terms of the Fed? And we're going to hear a little bit more from Federal Reserve Chair, J. Powell this week. He is testifying in front of the Benate's-- the Senate Banking Committee that's one of his semi-annual testimonies there, and he'll be there on Wednesday and Thursday. So interesting to see what he sees there. And then, I'm really focusing on Friday here too with what we see from the S&P Global PMIs. They just hit a 13-month high last month. It's been constantly expanding. So it'll be interesting to see if we get a read continuously above 50. Anything above 50 is considered economic expansion. Focusing now in on the corporate calendar and what we have for earnings this week, really highlighted by FedEx. FedEx is Tuesday after the bell. You can see some other sprinkled earnings here. CarMax could be interesting to see what we see from the auto industry on Friday. But you really want to watch FedEx after the bell today. We've talked a lot before about how that's considered to be a relative bellwether for the economy. You remember back to FedEx's stock and how it's reacted over the last year. FedEx warned back in September that we were going to see that global recession, and they cut their guidance. It was sort of the start, the real kickoff in some ways of that big recession talk that we've had coming into the year. But now we've seen that recession talks sort of slowed down, so curious what we see from FedEx this year. Of course, truly, we could always debate whether FedEx should still be a bellwether stock, and maybe there are some other names you could throw in there. But usually a favorite for people to watch. JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, and as I talked about earlier in the show, Darden is going to be an interesting one too to see if people are still going out to eat as much, if they're pushing back against price increases at all. So still going to be a busy week. Thanks. JOSH SCHAFER: Yeah. JULIE HYMAN: Appreciate it.