 Welcome to FIG's weekly trading and economic update. I'm Mark Bailey and this is Jessica Russett. Mark, last week we had retail sales released domestically. The RBA had their monthly meeting keeping rates on hold and the ECB met on Thursday night. What was your take on it all? Yeah, look retail sales I think came in line with expectations at 0.4%. In terms of the RBA statement still very very upbeat in terms of Philip Lowe's commentary on the domestic markets and also internationally as well so that's continuing the theme that he's painted. I think as well you've got to be a bit cautious about some of the house prices and they're trying to control that in terms of the dynamics of the interest rates and you also had an interesting note from APRA as well kind of putting a bit of pressure on the banks in terms of some of their lending criteria as well. And yes last night on Thursday night you had the ECB announcing that they're going to keep rates on change. They were going to cut back on QE as planned but Draghi was still very dovish in terms of what he would do for the eurozone as and when necessary. You are seeing a bit of an uptick in terms of CPI so that's going to help him there in terms of pulling back and giving justification for that but I still see economic growth out of out of Europe has been pretty soft. So Jess, what's been keeping you busy this week? There's been a few more buybacks announced which obviously isn't helping investors with piles of cash to invest already. That's correct. So it was another week of short supply and over subscribed new issuance that hit the market and as you said there seems to be more buybacks than actually new issues being released at the moment and two buybacks that were announced at the market were one from McPherson's and one from I am Gold. So McPherson's limited announced a 60% partial redemption of its March 2019 floating rate bond and that's at a principal amount of 103%. So this is higher than where the bond had been trading prior to the announcement and then post the announcement the bond spiked in price and it's improved by two dollars in price terms so that's a really good outcome for clients. Was that the call? Was that the call date at 103? Yeah that's correct so that's a 103 call price for clients and so it is actually being called at its first optional call date and that is the 31st of March 2017. The other one I mentioned which is in the US dollar denominated space is I am Gold and I am Gold is doing a full redemption of its October 2020 US dollar bond and that is after it has successfully completed a 2025 maturity 400 million US dollar new offering and those funds are going to be used to call back and buy back this 2020 bond. Now the 2020 bond has a call price of 103 spot 375 and once again this is also higher than where the bond had been trading prior to the news and so clients get a little bit more gain a little bit cash back which is a great outcome. On the back of the news it too spiked in price and the price has gone up two dollars as well so it's also a great outcome for clients and the expected redemption date for the 2020 bond for I am Gold is going to be the 3rd of April 2017. So in the meantime clients are still able to trade both of these bonds switch out of those positions and reinvest into other bonds and the beauty of doing that now is that clients are able to take advantage of supply already out on the market rather than waiting until after the call day and being in competition with other investors trying to find a home for these readily available funds and the other benefit of it also is to lock in a yield now rather than being at the mercy of any market movement over the next coming weeks while we wait for that call date. So it's kind of a bit of sweet because you're getting cash back at a really good price but you probably don't want cash back so you've got to try and find another home for it to reinvest. Exactly that's right so it's really better to maybe have a look now and line up that order and avoid any reinvestment risk. So all eyes are going to be on the U.S. we have non-farm payrolls being released and that's going to lead up to the Fed meeting as well talk us through it. Yes there's a lot of important data coming out in the next few days before the Fed meeting as you say next week. So on Friday we've got the non-farm payrolls market consensus for 200,000 jobs to be created and also we've got CPI and retail sales CPI is probably flat on a headline basis 0.2% on core and retail sales excluding fuel is expected to be marginally positive at 0.1% so those are the key three data points and to be honest yes they've probably got to be massively out of whack with what's happening in terms of consensus expectations for there to be a change in the Fed's thinking. The market is pricing in 95 to 100% chance that they do hike rates in March next week and that's unless we get some really strange figures coming out from those three data points I think that's going to be the case. You know kind of looking beyond that be interesting to see if there's any commentary in terms of the gradual pace of interest rate heights going forward but I don't think there'll be a lot of change. Janet Yellen had a couple of commentaries out there where she was basically saying March is a done deal but that doesn't imply that we're going to speed up any future rate hikes but again it'll have a big impact in terms of the curve and we've seen those interest rates yields on the treasuries increasing this week pretty significantly over the last couple of days kind of 10-15 basis points higher in the 10 year and also it'll impact the currency and where the Aussie dollar trades in relation to the US so there'll be important data points looking forward in the statement. Thanks Jess. Thanks Mark. Thanks for watching. Tin hats on. Enjoy.