Was the US economic data good enough this week to induce a rate hike tomorrow?

 Does the US economy support a rate hike? We have had some important economic data from the US this week. It is true that the FED won´t base their rate hike decision on this week´s data, as the FED members should have made their mind up already. But, many were looking at the data this week for small hints. So, what did we have this week? We had the retail sales yesterday and the monthly CPI (inflation) today. Tomorrow, we´ll get to see the unemployment claims and the building permits, but those two data pieces are not that important in relation to the interest rate decision. This is because employment is in a pretty good shape and both the building and housing sectors, in general, are in an even better position. That´s why everyone is watching the inflation and the retail sales. Inflation, which is quite low at the moment, is always an important factor for any central bank - especially when it comes to interest rate decisions. The retails sales are not as important usually, but right now they are because the US consumer confidence has declined recently. With exports suffering from weak global demand, the only way that the US economy will continue its recovery is by increasing the domestic demand. That might pull the rest of the world up as well. The retail sales indicate how willing the US consumers are to spend and that in itself indicates how confident the consumers are about their income. The main headline of the retail sales yesterday was a bit soft but if you strip it off from the autos and gas the control group was not as bad. The same goes for inflation, the main number was negative, but the core number (which leaves out energy, gas and food) was slightly positive. Still, the expectations were 0.1% higher and the USD suffered some minor losses. So, we didn´t get any clues from the US data this week, thus everything remains a mystery until tomorrow. We just opened an EUR/USD sell forex signal, hoping that this spike reverses back down. Check out our live  Forex signals You can also sign up for our  premium Forex signals