The week ahead - 15-19 April 2024
These are the Key Macro Events for the upcoming week.
Eurozone – Industrial production in the eurozone probably expanded slightly in February compared to the previous month. This comes after the volatility in the production figures of December (+1.6%) and January (-3.2%). Looking beyond the monthly volatility in the data, the eurozone industrial sector seems to be bottoming out at the moment after activity contracted noticeably throughout 2023. Structural headwinds however do persist preventing a strong recovery.
Netherlands: Dutch unemployment figures for March are published on Thursday. We expect it to have increased again by 0.1 pp, to 3.8%. Labour market indicators show that the tightness is marginally easing. With bankruptcies normalising from pandemic lows, labour mobility will pick up. Also, private labour demand from SMEs will cool due to higher costs related to refinancing. However, the labour market will stay tight in historical perspective, with an ageing population, shortages for specific jobs (related to technical skills, for instance) and elevated public labour demand. The unemployment rate is expected to average 4.0% in 2024 and 4.2% in 2025, compared to 3.6% in 2023.
US: We expect retail sales to continue growing at more trend-like levels, following the slowdown since early this year. Industrial production is expected to show further signs of a bottoming out, consistent with the signals coming from the manufacturing PMI.
China – Consensus expectation including ours is for the PBoC to keep its medium-term lending rate on hold at 2.50% on Monday. We expect quarterly GDP growth (due Tuesday) to have accelerated to around 1.5% qoq sa in Q1-2024 (2023-Q4: 1.0%), in line with consensus (average estimate). The recovery is partly driven by the filtering through of stimulus, and is still led by the supply side.