Market Adjusts Ahead of Economic Reports and Bernanke Speech

“Today’s rally is more or less a readjustment [after Tuesday’s selloff.  There is] really no news.”

– Barry Hyman (subscription required), Equity Market Strategist, EKN Financial

We can’t seem to get a calm week on Wall Street, even when there’s not much to trade on, can we? 

Stocks were down big yesterday on a couple of relatively unimportant economic reports that didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.  And now they are up again today on very little news. 

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However, there are a couple of significant events coming up Thursday and Friday.

On Thursday, we have the first revision to 2nd quarter GDP, so called preliminary GDP.  (Dell will also report earnings tomorrow).

On Friday, we get the Income and Expenditures Reports for July.  The expenditures report includes the widely followed Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) index inflation measure.

Fed Chief Ben Bernanke is also going to give a talk at Jackon Hole, Wyoming in which everybody will be trying to interpret his every turn of phrase as leaning towards or against a rate cut.

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It really won’t be until after Labor Day however that we really start to find out some important things.  That’s when the investment banks and private equity firms will start to try and sell that $300 billion backlog of LBO loans and debt.  That will tell us a lot about how much, or if, the credit markets have recovered.