Three things matter this week and all three land after Tuesday. The July PCE print arrives Wednesday morning, Nvidia reports Wednesday after the close, and the Jackson Hole symposium runs Thursday through Saturday. Everything before that is positioning.
The setup that gives the week its asymmetry is in the rates market. Going into the weekend it was pricing roughly 9 basis points of hikes for September and about 23 basis points of tightening across the rest of 2026. That is a market that has already given up on cuts. A soft PCE print doesn’t buy much from that starting point. A hot one prices more tightening into a tape that is three sessions off a record.
Monday, August 24
Nearly empty. The Chicago Fed National Activity Index for July at 8:30 AM ET, and that’s the extent of the US data. PDD and XPEV report before the open. Treasury Secretary Bessent is speaking. Monday in a week like this is a day when conviction trades get deferred, not placed.
Tuesday, August 25
- 9:00 AM ET: FHFA monthly home prices and Case-Shiller 20-city index, both for June
- 10:00 AM ET: New Home Sales for July, Consumer Confidence for August, Richmond Fed index
- 1:00 PM ET: Treasury sells $69 billion in 2-year notes
Consumer Confidence is the one worth watching, because it follows a July retail sales miss and a Michigan sentiment print that fell from 55.2 to 51.0 with one-year inflation expectations at 4.3%. If the Conference Board number confirms that, the consumer story stops being a single bad month.
Earnings after the close: INTU, ZM, BOX, HEI, SMTC. The Jefferies Semis, IT Hardware and Comm Tech conference opens in Chicago and runs into Wednesday, with the Stifel Tech Executive Summit on the same two days.
Wednesday, August 26
The heavy day. At 8:30 AM ET the July PCE and core PCE arrive on both a monthly and yearly basis, alongside personal income, personal spending, and the second estimate of Q2 GDP with its deflator and price series. The Dallas Fed trimmed PCE follows at 10:00. Treasury sells $70 billion in 5-year notes at 1:00.
Read the print through the symposium rather than on its own. Whatever comes out Wednesday morning is the number Warsh will be asked about Thursday, and the market will trade it primarily as an input to what he says rather than as a standalone data point.
Then the close. NVDA reports around 4:20 PM ET, and it lands alongside CRM, CRWD, SNPS, HPQ, NTNX, OKTA and VEEV. Nvidia carries index-level weight by itself, which is the reason the whole week is shaped around a single Wednesday evening. The reaction gets priced in Asia overnight before US cash opens on Thursday.
Thursday, August 27
- 8:30 AM ET: weekly jobless claims, continuing claims, advance goods trade balance for July
- 11:00 AM ET: Kansas City Fed manufacturing for August
- 1:00 PM ET: Treasury sells $44 billion in 7-year notes
Jackson Hole opens, running through Saturday. Fed Chair Warsh is expected to speak on monetary policy, with the exact time not yet posted. The symposium is usually more academic conference than policy venue, but it has been used for genuine signalling often enough that the market treats it as event risk.
MRVL reports after the close, one day behind Nvidia, along with WDAY, ADSK, AFRM, ESTC, IREN and ULTA. Marvell in that slot is the read on the attach layer rather than the compute layer, and it comes with the Google warrant now sitting on the cap table. The question is whether the print breaks out Google custom-products revenue as its own line, because the contract vests in half-billion-dollar increments and the number is now trackable.
Friday, August 28
- 10:00 AM ET: University of Michigan final for August, including one-year and five-year inflation expectations
- 1:00 PM ET: Baker Hughes rig count
The preliminary annual benchmark revision to payrolls also lands Friday, and it deserves more attention than the thin calendar suggests. Level revisions to employment have reshaped the labor market narrative more than the monthly prints have. Rates desks treat the preliminary figure as real event risk rather than a formality, and it arrives with the symposium still in session.
What the Week Actually Resolves
Not much, on the inflation side. The market has already bought disinflation and repriced toward tightening, so PCE mostly determines the tone of the questions Warsh gets rather than the answers. The genuine unknowns are the payrolls benchmark and whether Nvidia’s guide is enough to hold a tape that has been trading multiple sensitivity rather than earnings for two weeks. Fabrinet fell 11.3% on stronger results earlier this month. That is the environment the Wednesday and Thursday prints are walking into.