The Economic Week Ahead: September 5-8

It's a short week ahead and a light one for economic releases. We expect that the financial markets will start to focus on the following week when both the CPI and  the federal deficit will be released for August on Wednesday, September 13. One week after that happens, the FOMC will decide whether to hike the federal funds rate or not. We think the Fed is done. We remain optimistic about the outlook for inflation, but we can't find any way to put lipstick on the debt pig that Washington is feeding.

In any event, August's NM-PMI (Wed) could confirm that the services economy is slowing as shown by the comparable series compiled by S&P Global (chart).