Data wise, this’ll be a slow week for the world’s largest economy.

There’s just one notable update due: Retail sales figures covering March.

That release will be eyed for the juxtaposition between headline nominal spending and the control group. The former will be biased higher by the largest-ever one-month jump in gas prices, shown in all its terrifying glory below.

Thanks to that, nominal spending probably expanded a brisk 1.3% in March from February.

That’d be the “best” pace in a year, but pump price inflation isn’t a healthy driver of consumption. Once you strip out the energy shock, retail sales growth was likely tepid last month in America.

Economists expect the control group — which goes into GDP forecasting — to show a mere 0.2% gain for March, less than half the prior month’s pace.

“The spread between the two series will be notable as an indication of the pressure on discretionary spending resulting from the recent spike in energy prices,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen remarked. “As with the broader fallout from the war, it’s likely too soon to see convincing evidence of either the downside risk or further resilience of the US consumer.”

New records on Wall Street may alleviate some war-related macro concerns in the US. After all, conspicuous consumption in America’s brought to you buy the upper-half of the “K-shaped” economy, where asset price inflation influences spending decisions. And the S&P’s up 13% in three weeks.

“The influence of the wealth effect on inflation and consumption is topical in the context of the ability of the US economy to emerge relatively unscathed in the wake of the war in the Mideast,” Lyngen went on.

Of course, there’s no shortage of angst around the sustainability of the stock rally either, and that underlines how stale backward-looking data really is in 2026’s fast-paced geopolitical environment. Any weakness in underlying (i.e., ex-gas) US retail sales could be written off as old news in the context of new records for stocks but now, with equities overbought and another Iran ceasefire deadline coming up, the stock rally’s at risk of reversing.

There’s no use overcomplicating things: Whether US shares can extend what’s already the best rolling rally since the rebound from the original COVID plunge depends almost entirely on what happens (or doesn’t happen) during a second round of peace talks in Pakistan this week.

“Markets remain dominated by a single driver: Oil-price volatility, which explain[s] roughly two-thirds of cross-asset return variability,” JPMorgan’s Fabio Bassi remarked.

As discussed at some length here, the path forward goes through a minefield (figuratively and literally), and you should expect all manner of bombastic brinksmanship. On Sunday, for example, the US Navy seized an Iranian-flagged ship in the Gulf of Oman.

That said, neither side can afford to keep at it with all-out, open military hostilities. My intuition tells me the risk rally’s due for a breather either way. As a long-only investor, I’ll be happy to be wrong.