It was an extremely quiet day for the eurozone, with no major economic data releases on the schedule until Tuesday. However, the research group, Sentix, reported that investor confidence in the eurozone has dropped to its lowest level since November 2014. Its investor sentiment index for the eurozone fell to -3.7 in February from -1.5 in January, which is the sixth consecutive month of declines and much worse than the -0.6 the markets had expected.
Today could be a big day for the euro area, as we will get more of an idea of how Germany and the eurozone have fared of late. Services PMI in Germany is expected to increase to 53.1 from 51.8 the previous month, while in the eurozone as a whole, it is expected to drop to 50.8 from 51.2. The services industry is so often the sector that supports the others when they are struggling, so it will be interesting to see if that proves to be the case again today.
We will also see retail sales for December, which are expected to slow to 0.5% from 1.1% on an annual basis.
