What to Watch - Week of 28 April 2025

Tapas Strickland | Markets Research 

Past Week

• Australian data flow has been very quiet with nothing scheduled of note over the past week
• Offshore, markets have been incredibly volatile reacting to headlines on tariffs and on whether Trump was exploring options to fire Fed Chair Powell
• Trump later said he had no intention in firing Powell and also suggested tariffs against China could be lowered, though later clarified this would be part of a negotiation and would not happen unilaterally

Week ahead

• In Australia Q1 CPI (Wednesday) dominates and we expect core trimmed mean inflation to be 0.6% q/q and 2.8% y/y, which would see core inflation be one tenth below the RBA’s Feb forecast track. Also during the week are the RBA’s Kent (Tuesday) and Retail Sales (Friday)
• Offshore, focus remains on US policy developments. Expect more on this front with President Trump celebrating his first 100 days in office at a rally in Michigan (Tuesday)
• Datawise in the US Q1 GDP (Wednesday), PCE (Wednesday), ISM Manufacturing (Thursday) and Payrolls (Friday) all have the potential to reflect some of the headwinds from trade/tariff uncertainty
• Earnings season also continues with tech heavy weights Amazon and Meta (both Wednesday), and Apple (Thursday)
• The Eurozone also has Q1 GDP (Wednesday) as well as the Preliminary CPI for April (Friday). In contrast the UK is very quiet with no top-tier data
• In China, the Official PMIs (Wednesday) take top billing. The Politburo is also set to meet by the end of April
• NZ has Employment Indicators (Monday) and the ANZ Business Survey (Wednesday)

Read the full report here

Chart 1: President Trump's approval rating has fallen, but it remains mostly higher than what it was during his first term

Chart 2: Data is missing expectations in the US, Europe and Australia

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