Australia:

Mon – Inflation gauge (Oct), job ads (Oct), Westpac FY results

Tue – RBA rates meeting, RBA statement on monetary policy

Wed – NAB FY results

Thu – Trade balance (Sep)

Fri – ANZ FY results

International:

Mon – US: factory orders

               EU – Manufacturing PMI

              CH: NPC Standing Committee meeting (4th-8th)

Tue – US: Presidential election, trade balance

Wed – US: Trade balance

Thu – UK: BoE rates decision

              US: FOMC rates decision, consumer credit

              CH: Trade balance

Fri – CH: NPC Standing Committee meeting closes

At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious – which of course is the general approach of Monday’s blog anyway – the US Presidential election is the big issue facing markets this week.

A vast body of analysis, opinion and guesswork have been dedicated to what any number of outcomes will mean, so we’ll steer clear of it at the moment, but will be back with the benefit of hindsight Monday week.

Sidestepping the election, central banks and interest rates are the other big theme of the week.

The RBA (Tuesday) is expected to leave rates on hold.

The Fed is expected to cut its rate target by another 25 bps on Thursday (Friday morning AEDT) and in the UK, the Bank of England (Thursday) is also expected to cut its key rate by 25bps to 4.75%.

Locally things are a bit data-lite.

The Melbourne Institute’s inflation gauge and the ANZ/Indeed job ads figures will be released this morning.

The Statement on Monetary Policy (Tuesday) is the RBA’s quarterly update on key economic forecasts – any twiddling of the dials is likely to be minor.

Thursday’s release of the trade balance is expected to confirm non-rural export prices have continued to fall, while a stronger Australian dollar in September may have cooled imports – the upshot likely to be a further narrowing of the trade surplus to around $5 billion over the month.

The US trade balance (Wed) is likely to report a $70 billion deficit for September.

One event that may slip under the radar is the Standing Committee meeting of the Chinese National People’s Congress this week.

A much-anticipated big stimulus package may well be revealed on the last day of the meeting (Friday).

There have been a few media briefings over the past couple of weeks, but no meaningful numbers tabled.

Société Generale is tipping a fiscal top up of 3 to 4 trillion yuan ($640 billion to $850 billion) or something in the order of 2.5% to 3.5% of GDP to be committed for the next few years.

If it is a package of that order of magnitude, it might just have the biggest impact on the local market of all the diary entries this week.