A quick look at the week ahead

For the PSE, earnings season is starting to heat up as financial condition reports trickle in and the FY23 teasers keep coming to manage our expectations. We get February inflation data from the Philippine Statistics Authority tomorrow morning, and that should pair well with the macroeconomic data that we’ll get from the US on Friday morning about initial jobless claims. 

MB bottom-line: There’s not a lot on the schedule, but things are happening. Of course, the entire market (and world) is watching the US Federal Reserve for signs of a pivot away from the regime of rate hikes and toward a new path of interest rate cuts. While the BSP doesn’t have to take what the Fed does as mandatory authority, what the Fed does will certainly be persuasive to our own central bank. There are a lot of plans that have been paused, waiting for the long-term economic weather trend to shift to a period of lower (and going lower) rates. The February inflation report and the jobless claims report are small components of the bigger picture, but that bigger picture is perhaps the most important thing for the world market at the moment, so what these numbers are and how they compare to estimates will be of elevated importance for a little while yet.

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