The FOMC minutes from the December meeting are due to be published tonight. It will be interesting to see what discussions the members had about the outlook for 2017, as the Fed was more hawkish than expected (see also: FOMC Review: Hawkish Fed even without Trump's fiscal boost , 14 December).
In the euro area, the HICP inflation figures will attract some attention today after German HICP surprisingly increased to 1.7% y/y in December, driven by higher energy, food and service prices. We have revised our expectation on the back of the higher-than-expected German inflation data released yesterday, and we now estimate euro area HICP inflation to come in at 1.2% y/y in December (revised up from 1.0% y/y previously) with core inflation increasing to 0.9% y/y - the highest inflation print since August 2013. Part of the increase in core inflation should be due to the volatile package tours and we do not expect this to change the ECB's stance that underlying price pressure lacks a convincing upward trend. Hence, we still believe the ECB will NOT announce tapering this year.
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