What to Watch - Week of 3 March 2025

Tapas Strickland | Markets Research 

Past Week

• First month Australian Q1 Monthly CPI Indicator shows favourable housing disinflation, likely greenlighting a May RBA rate cut
• US tariff uncertainty remains, seeing sizable risk adverse moves. The AUD has been a major casualty, down some -2.3% on the week against a 0.7% rise in the USD (DXY)

Week ahead

• A busy week in Australia. The major pieces are Q4 GDP (Wednesday), Retail Sales (Tuesday), a speech by RBA Deputy Governor Hauser (Wednesday) and the RBA Minutes from February (Tuesday). Even though it is busy, it is hard to see any of that moving the dial as far as policy expectations go.
• Offshore, it is a very busy week with major risk events being:
  • (1) whether tariffs are imposed on Canada, Mexico and China (Tuesday);
  • (2) China’s NPC and whether concrete new policies are announced (Wednesday);
  • (3) Markets sensitivity to US data which includes the ISMs (Monday and Wednesday), Payrolls and Fed Chair Powell (both Friday)
• Elsewhere the ECB meets (Thursday) and is widely expected to cut rates. Dataflow out of Europe outside of this is relatively quiet
• In China, alongside the NPC, are the Official PMIs (Saturday March 1) and the Trade Balance (Friday)
• And in NZ are pre-GDP partials and the RBNZ’s inflation conference with a variety of speakers, including BoE MPC member Mann (Friday)

Chart 1: Dataflow in the US surprising to the downside

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