US housing and earnings releases next week

Ahead of the following week's FOMC meeting, next week's markets will have relatively little to digest except for equities. The Fed slips into its black-out period on Tuesday and there are currently no scheduled speakers before then.

Housing will be the only macro focus with resales and new home sales due out for the month of June on Wednesday and Friday, respectively. Sizeable gains the preceding month may put the headline results at risk this time around. That was also true of the recent retail sales release that softened in June following large prior gains. 

Nevertheless, one of the key debates is whether or not this upward trend will persist given the sharp rise in the 30 year fixed mortgage rate since April. It's up by about 50bps to 4.2% and back at its highest since late last summer. However, by dampening refi processing, higher mortgage rates free up constrained industry capacity to process new purchase applications and thus may have the effect of improving mortgage access. Being approved at a higher rate is better than being unable to access cheap mortgage credit.

Earnings will be a prime focus throughout the week and an active week it will be. No fewer than 130 earnings reports are due to land from S&P500 listed firms. Among the many household names are Morgan Stanley, Lockheed Martin, BoNYM, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Boeing, Coca Cola, Amex, Dow, Eli Lilly, McDonald's, GM, Caterpillar, AT&T, Starbucks, Amazon, Visa, and 3M. So far, about 10% of the index has reported and 72% have beaten analysts' earnings expectations. That's not unusual in the US post-SOX and post-dot-com since analysts became more conservative.