Labour stats and inflation

On Tuesday, the ONS will give us the latest about the labour market which has been a bearer of good news for a long time.

In the last three readings unemployment has been stable at 4.2% and we expect no changes.

More interesting will be the stats on earnings which appear to have already peaked at the start of the year. With inflation receding, we will see if in May real wages reported any actual growth.

The next day we will take a look at the other component of real wages: inflation.

Prices have gone down more than expected in the first six months of 2018 and this put a break on the BoE decision to rise Bank rates.

In May, CPI was stable at 2.4%, however energy prices and, most of all, a base effect (June 2017 CPI was quite low) are likely to push inflation up. Market expectations are for an annual expansion of around 2.6%.

A lot of beer has been sold

As reported in our latest blog about the World Cup, an extra 30 million pints of beer have been sold during the tournament and one third of the respondents to the Barclaycard survey reported to have spent more than usual in June.

Even if usually we don’t focus too much on retail sales, we will keep a close eye to the data released on Thursday to check to what extent football and good weather had a positive effect on sales and the service sector.

On the same day, we will also update our Pay Bulletin which will be available to our subscribers.

Stay tuned!