Bernanke to Testify at 10 am

Today looks to be an eventful day. After the market’s worst day in more than three months, investors look to make back some gains today. The biggest news today will be Ben Bernanke’s testimony at 10 am before the Senate Banking Committee.

Wall Street is still trying to digest the fallout from the elections in Italy. What seems to have happened, and we still don’t exactly know, is that this is the first election in which voters said no to austerity and by austerity, I mean Germany. In other countries like Greece and Ireland, the voters eventually pleased the markets. The Italians, however, did not. There’s no clear-cut winner and Italians may have to head back to the polls soon. In response, the euro dropped very sharply yesterday although it made back some of its losses.

Look what else we have on tap for this morning: The FAHA House Price Index and Case Shiller Index come out at 9 am. Then at 10 am, New Home Sales, the Richmond Fed Index and Consumer Confidence are released.

As I’ve talked about before, the key driver of the economy and market is any area where the consumer intersects with finance like cars, homes or travel. We also see that in spillover industries. We saw a good example of that this morning as Home Depot ($HD) reported earnings of 68 cents per share which was four cents better than estimates.

Posted by on February 26th, 2013 at 8:49 am


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