Summary:

• Industrial production figures from the European countries in the morning

• Data from the Canadian labour market scheduled for the early afternoon

• Norwegian CPI misses expectations heavily

In Friday’s calendar we do not have many important macroeconomic readings scheduled for release.Throughout the morning industrial production data from European economies is going to be published with the UK print being the major one. In the early afternoon figures concerning condition of the Canadian labour market will take the stage. Moreover, Norwegian CPI data has been already released showing a huge miss as the underlying measure came out at 1.1% against 1.5% in YoY terms.

9:30 am BST – UK, Industrial Production for December. A measure showing an output of manufacturers, quarries and utilities produced. The total value of UK industrial production has been constantly increasing lately as we have not seen a reading indicating shrinking of output since June 2017. Last month’s print was quite an upbeat surprise as it came out at 2.5% YoY against 1.8% YoY expected. However, this time market consensus calls for a reading of 0.3% YoY what would indicate a major slowdown. In MoM terms UK industrial production is expected to show a decrease of 0.9%.

1:30 pm BST – Canada, Employment Change for January. An important piece of data from the Canadian labour market showing a number of people employed in the prior month. We have not seen a print showing a decrease of employed people since July 2016 therefore we can say that the Canadian labour market is in quite solid condition. This time surveyed economists point for another increase of 10k what would indicate quite a severe slowdown against 78.6k seen last month. Simultaneously Canadian unemployment rate will be released which is expected to remain on the level of 5.8%.

Central banks speakers scheduled for today:

4:45 pm BST – BOE’s Cunliffe

CAD has been underperforming against GBP as of late. Will today’s labour market data change this tendency? Source: xStation5