This’ll be a busy week on the macro-market front, and probably on the political front too.

The data docket in the US is jam-packed. I’d say payrolls is the marquee event, but that’s not necessarily true. The BEA will publish the first estimate of Q1 GDP on Wednesday. Wall Street estimates run the gamut from tipping a 1.5% contraction to a 1.1% expansion. Officially, consensus is +0.4%.

As a reminder, there was a lot of debate around the veracity of various “now”casts in Q1. The most famous of those models, produced by the Atlanta Fed, tipped a near 4% contraction at one juncture. Critics argued — correctly — that gold flows were distorting the estimate, but even when adjusting for those flows, the model tipped a meaningful diminution as of early-April. Currently, it suggests a modest 0.4% contraction.

Other models aren’t nearly as pessimistic, but barring a multi-standard deviation upside surprise to professional forecasts, the figures will show a sharp slowdown, even if the world’s largest economy doesn’t shrink.

As the simple figure shows, a consensus print would count as the slowest growth in three years, and the second-weakest of the post-pandemic era. I’m not sure what that is, but I know what it isn’t: It’s not a “golden age.”

The BEA’s also cramming March’s personal income and spending report into Wednesday’s release schedule, which means we’ll get the breakdown on personal consumption for the final month of Q1 just an hour and a half after the cumulative quarterly tally. That release — PCE — will of course come packaged with an update on the Fed’s preferred inflation metric. Core PCE prices are seen rising just 0.1% MoM.

Also, the government will publish the Employment Cost Index for Q1 mid-week. That’s the Fed’s favorite measure of labor costs, and while it’s no longer as relevant in the policy calculus as it was in late 2021 and throughout 2022, it’s still something the Committee watches closely. Consensus is looking for 0.9% from the release, the same increase as Q4.

Note that the impact of Donald Trump’s policies, including and especially the first rounds of tariffs and the deleterious impact of the levies on consumer sentiment, should begin to bleed the hard data beginning with April’s readouts. It’s probably too early to expect a dramatic hit to jobs growth, but that may be coming if Trump doesn’t dial back the threats and posthaste. Businesses are nervous. Nobody likes uncertainty.

Consensus is looking for 133,000 from the NFP headline. Recall that March’s report was a blockbuster, but the blowout hiring print was summarily dismissed as old news in light of tariff escalations.

I realize this is too nonspecific to be meaningful, let alone useful, but my guess is that the bottom falls out of the NFP headline at some point over the next three or four months. Trump’s looking for trouble on any number of fronts, and eventually he’s going to find it.

Also on deck, in order of importance, ISM manufacturing (seen in contraction at 48), Treasury’s quarterly refunding announcement (Scott Bessent needs to retain the forward guidance suggesting coupon increases aren’t imminent; changing that at a time when the US long-end’s nervous is a fool’s errand; don’t say you weren’t warned, Scott), Conference Board confidence (which’ll be eyed in the long shadow of one of the worst University of Michigan sentiment releases ever), ADP private hiring (the NFP amuse-bouche is seen at 120k), JOLTS (old news, but still relevant at the margins), pending home sales (seen posting a slight increase despite acute and persistent affordability challenges in US housing) and updates on the two national home price gauges.

As if all that’s not enough, big-tech earnings kick into high gear this week.

Commenting on the GDP release, BMO’s Ian Lyngen wrote that, “the White House might soon have to explain away a contracting real economy that is based largely on Trump’s trade policies.” “It’s unclear,” Lyngen went on, “whether this will dissuade the President from a more aggressive stance on trade or serve to galvanize his hardline approach — particularly with China.”