The data docket’s crowded in the US this week, when traders and investors will contend with top-tier releases including the preliminary tally of Q2 GDP and an update on the Fed’s preferred price gauge.

Notwithstanding a surprisingly robust retail sales report covering June, the data generally points to a US economy that’s slowing, consistent with the Fed’s efforts to finally corral price growth more than three years after inflation accelerated during the earliest month’s of Joe Biden’s presidency.

The advance read on growth for Q2 is expected to show the world’s largest economy expanded at a 1.9% pace from April to June.

Coming on the heels of Q1’s final read — 1.4% — a consensus print on the headline would mark the coolest back-to-back growth reads since 2022.

Of course, there’s nothing “slow” about 1.9% real growth for the US economy. “One would be remiss to characterize growth as anything other than solid,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen and Vail Hartman remarked.

At this juncture, a September start to rate cuts from the Fed is seen as a foregone conclusion. Even an above-consensus GDP print won’t change that. It’s possible, I suppose, that an anomalously robust read on personal consumption could affect trader-implied September odds, but it’s hard to picture a scenario where consumption overshoots so much as to move market pricing more than a handful of basis points.

That means the quarterly core PCE series will be the most policy-relevant part of the release. Recall that it accelerated to a disconcerting 3.7% in Q1.

Consensus is looking for 2.7% for Q2.

That’ll anticipate Friday’s June PCE prices update, which is incorporated in Thursday’s GDP release. Coming as it does on the heels of the coolest CPI report since the onset of America’s inflation nightmare, the PCE inflation figures will probably “confirm” that price pressures have abated enough for Fed officials to at least start the rate-cut conversation at this month’s meeting.

Consensus expects to hear core price growth ran 0.1% from May to June. That’d mark consecutive sub-0.2% MoM prints, pushing the three-month annualized rate to 1.8%, which is to say below target. Remember: The Fed wants to start cutting before the 12-month reading hits 2% in order to preempt a downturn.

Also on the schedule this week: New and existing home sales, flash PMIs for July and the final read on University of Michigan sentiment for this month.

The Fed’s in the pre-meeting quiet period ahead of the July 31 FOMC meeting, but the political cacophony in the US will continue, deafening and unabated.

“It would be an understatement to suggest there is a heightened degree of headline risk during the coming weeks,” BMO’s Lyngen and Hartman wrote, in the same note mentioned above. “While we’ve seen how the market responds to improved odds of a Trump victory, it is less obvious how rates would respond to a last-minute switch in the nominee for the Democratic Party.”