U.S. stock index futures are trading modestly higher this morning and the dollar recently hit a six-week high after Fed Chair Janet Yellen reiterated the Fed's stance that there will be a rate hike this year.
Late last night, Greek lawmakers passed a bailout agreement that should keep Greece in the euro. Now we wait for the German Bundestag vote on Friday on whether to approve the new rescue package.
But in the meantime, ECB President Mario Draghi will speak shortly during his news conference, after the central bank left interest rates unchanged.
And now, with the panic from Greece subsiding, we can again focus on China and its market implosion.
We worry about the negative wealth effect from all the stock market losses and the impact on consumer spending in the world's most voracious economy. Meanwhile, big-name hedge fund managers including Bill Ackman, Paul Singer and Jeffrey Gundlach have pointed to what's going on in China as a bigger catastrophe than the subprime implosion in the States and believe it to be worse than the U.S. in 2007, with the area uninvestable.
The earnings calendar is full today with some notable earnings from BB&T (BBT), UnitedHealth (UNH), KeyCorp (KEY), Philip Morris (PM), Blackstone (BX), eBay (EBAY), Fairchild Semiconductor (FCS), Sonoco (SON), Domino's Pizza (DPZ), Goldman Sachs (GS), Citigroup (C), Sherwin-Williams (SHW), Charles Schwab (SCHW), SolarWinds (SWI), Action Alerts Plus holding Google (GOOGL), Mattel (MAT), Cintas (CTAS), Schlumberger (SLB), and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
We also have a full domestic economic calendar today:
8:30 a.m. -- Initial Jobless Claims (July 11), with consensus at 285,000;
9:45 a.m. -- Bloomberg Consumer Comfort;
10:00 a.m. -- the July Philadelphia Fed Business Outlook and the July NAHB Housing Market Index;
10:30 a.m. -- EIA natural-gas storage change;
And at 2:30 p.m. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will testify to the Senate Banking Committee.
Happy trading!
Bryan Ashenberg is the portfolio manager for Growth Seeker and the fundamental analyst forTrifecta Stocks. Test drive with a free trial.
