Greek elections over the weekend yielded the less dramatic result of a victory for pro-bailout conservatives.  This is ostensibly a good thing for the global economy as it means that Greece will continue down the path of austerity, thus preserving it's ability to draw on bailout funding, itself preserving Greece's ability to avoid default and remain in the Euro-zone.  The Greek drama is far from over, but this is a "risk-positive" development for now.

What's good for "risk" usually isn't good for bond markets.  Although it could be argued that G20 central banks might have been ready to unleash some massive unified liquidity measures (they hinted at it for sure), we'll never know exactly what that would have looked like.  Furthermore, if past precedent is a guide, no similar crisis response in the EU has had any sort of miraculous effect, and more often than not, quickly degenerates into being viewed as "too small a band-aid on too big a wound."

It remains to be seen how this rather uneventful passage of Greek elections will be traded, but we do expect any knee-jerk reaction to be relatively muted by the looming FOMC events on Wednesday.  And it's these events (Announcement itself, Member Forecasts, and Chairman Press Conference) that bring us to the core of "The Week Ahead."  Other than any latent reactionary trading to Greek elections, the FOMC is really "it" for the entire week. 

Case in point, Monday and Tuesday's data is limited--too limited to cause much of a reaction ahead of the FOMC.  Today has just one meager release with the National Association of Home Builder's Housing Market Index.  Things pick up a bit tomorrow with Housing Starts (which includes Building Permits), but again, there's just the one release.  Even on Fed day, The Fed steals the show with no scheduled economic data on Wednesday morning other than the interesting, but not market-moving MBA Mortgage Apps.  Thursday sees the highest concentration of market data just in time for markets to be exclusively focused on dissecting and trading the FOMC events, and Friday is completely empty.  To reiterate: all about the FOMC.