Interest rates in the UK and Europe. US unemployment figures
Monday 4 July
9.30am: Purchasing Managers Index survey looks at how the building trade fared last month. Should show a slight improvement in growth rates.
9.30am: Bank of England figures to show how much people remortgaged their houses in the first quarter of the year. Given the weak economy since Lehman Brothers collapsed, remortgaging seems so noughties. The previous three months housing equity renewal was down £7bn.
Tuesday 5 July
7am: Home shopping group, N Brown, which owns the Figleaves undies brand, has a trading statement out. Is the current economic climete putting people off spending on smalls?
7am: Housebuilder Persimmon and property developer St Modwen have trading statements against the backdrop of a relatively upbeat mood for the sector lately, particularly in London.
9.30am: PMI survey looks at the services sector at a time when some other surveys have been pretty wobbly on this driver of the economy. Expect a slight reduction in growth, but growth nonetheless.
9.30am: Changes in the country's official reserves will also be anounced by the Government for June.
Wednesday 6 July
0001: British Retail Consortium figures on shop prices for June. The previous month's were up 2.3% - a suspiciously low figure given the wider surge in prices.
7am: EasyJet has monthly traffic stats.
9am: New car registrations will show how many people felt flush enough last month to buy a new motor. Unsurprisingly, the previous month's figures were down 1.7% on a year ago.
Thursday 7 July
7am: From the high street, Dunelm and WH Smith give us their trading statements. Could well not be pretty. Dunelm warned about profit margins being squeezed by high commodities prices a couple of months back while WH Smith has seen sales fall. However, Smiths has managed to protect margins by focusing on more profitable product lines and doing less discounting.
7am: Hays the recruitment group has a trading statement. Trickling out of the City are a fair few hefty job losses in the last few weeks so Hays' views will be sought on the Square Mile.
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9.30am: Manufacturing data from the Office for National Statistics. An important one, this, as our factories have been pretty much the only sector growing in output and and exports. With the pound still weak these figures should be pretty good for May - up about 1% against the previous month's fall of 1.7%.
Noon: interest rates announcement from the Bank of England. Will the monetary policy committee increase the cost of borrowing from the current 0.5%? No. Despite growing calls in some quarters for monetary policy to be tightened with a rate rise, the weak state of the economy makes such a move highly unlikely.
12.45pm: European Central Bank announces interest rates for the eurozone. Despite the plight of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland, expect them to increase the rate from 1.25% to 1.5%. All because Germany is concerned its turbocharged economy is overheating, or so cynics would say.
Friday 8 July
7am: Bovis Homes follows on from Persimmon's trading statement.
9.30am: Factory gate prices - in other words, the prices factories are selling their goods for. We can expect to see prices rise 3.3% on the year. That sounds bad, but consider this: the raw materials and energy costs being faced by manufacturers is likely to have risen by 16.3%. That figure - known as the output cost - will also be released.
1.30pm: US non-farm payrolls. Unemployment numbers for the world's biggest economy always move the markets. Investors are looking for a fairly healthy number in June - with the number in work up by 85,000 against the previous month's 54,000. But make no mistake, unemployment is still a major challenge for Barack Obama. Possibly the biggest. The jobless rate will probably stay at a deeply worrying 9.1%.
