Wall Street gets no rest this weekend. The coming week packs a White House summit, the week’s marquee earnings report, and the first hard economic data since the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.
The headline event is Thursday’s Trump–Xi summit in Washington. Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives around September 23 for a day of meetings on September 24, the second in-person meeting of the two leaders this year after President Trump’s May state visit to Beijing, according to summit coverage. The agenda is enormous: reciprocal tariffs with the trade truce expiring November 10, rare-earth exports after some Chinese suppliers paused shipments in early September, agricultural purchases, energy trade, Taiwan, Iran, and AI competition. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is expected at the state dinner, and Xi is bringing Chinese executives from BYD, CATL, Xiaomi, and the Bank of China. One risk hangs over it all: China has warned it could cancel if the United States approves a pending roughly $14 billion Taiwan arms package.
The week’s biggest earnings report also lands Thursday. Costco reports fiscal fourth-quarter results after the close, with analysts expecting roughly $6.53 to $6.54 per share on $94.5 to $94.9 billion in revenue, according to earnings previews. Investors will watch comparable sales, membership renewal rates, and margins for a read on the American consumer, and the report comes just days after the company’s splashy DoorDash partnership announcement. Also Thursday morning: Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden, LongHorn), another consumer-spending bellwether, and TD Synnex, a read on AI infrastructure demand.
On the data front, Wednesday’s flash purchasing-manager indexes for the U.S., Germany, the eurozone, and the U.K. will be the first global activity reading since the Fed hike, per week-ahead calendars. The services-versus-manufacturing split will shape the odds of another hike in October. Thursday brings weekly jobless claims (prior week: 196,000), August new home sales (prior: 607,000), and the Kansas City Fed manufacturing survey. Friday closes with August durable goods orders, expected to fall 0.5% after July’s 1.1% gain, and the final September read on University of Michigan consumer sentiment (prior: 51.7), which will show whether the Fed hike dented household confidence.
The Fed itself will be talking. Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee speaks Monday, Philip Jefferson and John Williams speak Tuesday, and Richmond Fed President Thomas Barkin speaks Thursday morning at the Economic Club of Washington. Markets will parse every sentence for October-hike signals, with futures currently pricing roughly even odds.
Central banks abroad are mostly on hold: the People’s Bank of China sets its loan prime rate Monday (expected unchanged) and the Swiss National Bank decides Thursday (expected to hold at 0.00%).
One important correction for calendar-watchers: several outlets have listed August PCE inflation for Friday, September 25. The Bureau of Economic Analysis’s own schedule says Personal Income and Outlays for August, the report that contains the PCE price index, arrives Wednesday, September 30, alongside the third estimate of second-quarter GDP. Mark that date, not this Friday.
With Brent crude hovering just above $103, the 10-year Treasury flirting with 5%, and geopolitics back at the top of the agenda, next week has all the ingredients of another restless one. The summit, the earnings, and the PMIs will tell us whether this week’s rate hike was the start of a new tightening chapter or just a pause that rattled everyone.
