January CPI & Retail Sales Highlights Of The Week

The highlights of the week will be January CPI and retail sales on Wednesday and Thursday respectively. The rest of the week is fairly quiet with currently no RBA speakers or data on Monday and Tuesday.

• January CPI is expected to increase moderately to 3.6% y/y from 3.4% in December with forecasts between 3.4% and 4%. As it is the first month of the quarter it will contain limited updated information on services and will mainly cover goods prices. In seasonally adjusted terms, January 2023 rose 0.25% m/m and a rise at this rate would see January 2024 print at 3.4% y/y, so anything above this monthly rise would see annual inflation pick up.
• On Thursday retail sales for January print and are expected to rise 1.6% m/m after falling 2.7%. The series has been volatile due to changes in the timing of seasonal discounts and forecasts for January range from +0.3% to +2.5%. There are also likely to be revisions to recent data. The Westpac card tracker suggests that weak sales continued in January.
• There will be data that feeds into the national accounts released this week with Q4 construction on Wednesday (fc +0.6% q/q) and private capex on Thursday (fc +0.4% q/q). Q4 GDP prints on March 6.
• The RBA’s January private credit data are out on Thursday and are projected to rise 0.4% m/m, in line with December.
• CoreLogic house prices for February print at the end of the week. They rose 0.4% m/m and 10.4% y/y in January with smaller cities outperforming larger ones.
• The final February Judo Bank manufacturing PMI is published on Friday. The preliminary deteriorated to 47.7 from January’s 50.1.