Good morning! It’s going to be a busy day for business and economic news, and I’ll be your guide!

The local share market is likely to start its day higher despite a mixed performance on Wall Street (which was dragged down by a US tech sell-off).

The Australian dollar was marginally weaker at 65.4 US cents.

In economic news, the ABS will release its highly anticipated consumer price index (CPI) for the June quarter at 11:30am AEST.

Economists are expecting inflation will rise 3.8% in the year to June (which is also a quarterly increase of 1%).

If if turns out consumer prices are rising at an even faster pace, the Reserve Bank board will be under pressure to lift interest rates when it meets next week.

However, most economists (and market analysts) are predicting the RBA to keep rates on hold for a while, before cutting them from mid-2025.

What happened on Wall Street?

It was a mixed bag on US stock markets overnight.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite fell 0.5% and 1.3% respectively.

However, the Dow Jones managed to post a modest gain of 0.5%,

Wall Street was weighed down by a sell-off in megacap stocks, ahead of the heavyweight tech companies announcing their quarterly earnings this week.

Microsoft, seen by many as leading the artificial intelligence race, fell 0.9% to $US422.92 ahead of its quarterly results.

But after the closing bell, shares of Microsoft fell 2.8% after the software maker reported results that missed expectations for quarterly growth in its Azure cloud-computing service.

Chipmaker Nvidia, seen as a prime beneficiary of potential AI growth, tumbled 7% to $US103.73, weighing on other chip stocks.

Other megacap names like Apple, Amazon and Meta are all due to report earnings this week.