Strong US Retail Sales send yields soaring

In focus today

Today we get UK retail sales data for July at 8.00 CET. According to polls from Reuters, analysts expect overall retail sales to grow by 0.5% m/m and retail sales excl. fuels to grow by 0.8% m/m.

In the US, the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey is released at 16.00 CET. It is the preliminary release covering August, and analysts expect it to come in at 66.9 virtually unchanged from the 66.4 (revised) seen in July.

Fed's Goolsbee (voting member) speaks at 19.25 CET.

Economic and market news

What happened yesterday

In the US, retail sales data came in much stronger than analysts had expected, as growth for the headline stood at 1.0% m/m dwarfing the expected 0.3% m/m. Core retail sales also grew by more than expected as it stood at 0.4% m/m compared to consensus amongst analysts of 0.1% m/m. Combined with yet another low figure of initial jobless claims for the second week in a row, markets reacted promptly sending both 1-, 2- and 10-year Treasury yields up by more than 10bp in the aftermath.

Equity markets on the other hand reacted positively, appearing to shake off some of the recession-fears which caught on last week. As such, the S&P500 is now around only 2.5% off its all-time high.

As was widely expected, Norges Bank left their policy rate unchanged at 4.50%. Furthermore, Norges Bank gave no new signals on their monetary policy, which was also expected given how economic key figures had pointed slightly in both directions since the monetary policy meeting in June.

In the UK, GDP growth came in as expected by analysts with GDP unchanged m/m in June and 0.6% q/q in Q2.

What happened overnight

Markets in Asia have followed in the footsteps of yesterday's US session, and equities are in the green this morning led by Japan where the Nikkei 225 is up by around 3.1%.

Oil is giving some of its gains from yesterday back, as Brent is trading about 0.25% lower as of this morning at USD80.84/bbl.