Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Breakfast, where we cover the top news for investors every morning.

Thanks for joining us today. I'm Julie Morgan, host of Wall Street Breakfast, Seeking Alpha's daily flagship podcast.

This is our weekly show all about the catalyst for the upcoming week.

I'm joined by Kim Kahn.

He's the senior managing news editor at Seeking Alpha. I'm also joined by Kevin Curran. He's an associate

news editor at Seeking Alpha. Kim, Kevin, welcome to the show. Hey, good to be here.

Happy to be here. So Kim, as usual, you're starting off with macro today.

Yeah, and it's a bit of a quiet week, I guess, compared to the weeks that we've had just recently.

But that gives us a chance to kind of look into the more nitty gritty numbers that are about the

economy itself, about, like less about, you know, what the Fed impact is going to be.

So my highlights for next week are going to be retail sales. That's going to be interesting to see how the consumer is holding up now and whether or not that goes into a kind of hard landing or soft landing scenario.

It's going to be tough for the consumer. They've got to be feeling the pinch of these higher rates and

tighter lending standards that are being faced and if they do, they can continue to bounce back and as expected it's best to be a 0% 0%

0.7% rise compared to a 0.6% drop in the previous month. That's some encouragement for the market that's now kind of in this good news, this good news scenario because they kind of feel that the tightening cycle is is over.

We've also got housing starts and new home sales and existing home sales coming out next week and that's another part of the economy that people have seen like it was a leading indicator how much the kind of it was struggling, but maybe it too could start to see some growth again.

And that would be a very good sign and probably give a little support to the market.

But tell me this, how much of a difference could home sales make

especially since the interest rates are so high? Well I think the anticipation though that the

market has that interest rates are going to drop and right now cuts priced in starting at September and you know rates are seeing maybe the

among many is three quarter point rate cuts by the end of the year that could really spur some activity in the

you know groundbreaking of new homes so you get this forward forward-looking activity of

people saying okay rates are going to come down people are going to start to not just refinance but maybe look start looking in for to buy that would help start activity right away because it takes a while lags you know for the home

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