The week ahead has potential to offer decent amounts of markets movement only to the extent that it's economic data and auctions deviate from expectations.  Left to their own devices, bond markets seem eager to level off in current territory and establish some sort of sideways holding pattern ahead of the very important first two weeks of September.

In other words, if there were zero pieces of news or data between now and then, we'd expect things to stay relatively sideways here.  And in fact, even with the news and data on tap this week (and there's more of it than last week), we'd expect things to STILL stay relatively sideways IF the data isn't surprising enough to change any opinions about impending easing efforts to be announced (possibly as early as) the 9/13 Fed meeting.

The further caveat the week, EVEN IF some of the data falls significantly outside the range of estimates, there's still a good chance that markets would take whatever opportunities they could to gravitate back towards some point of equilibrium.  The reason for all this is simple: nothing on the agenda this week is remotely as important as the events in the first two weeks of September (including ECB announcement, FOMC Announcement, "back to reality" first week after vacation season, German court voting on constitutionality of ECB bond buying, and of course the Jobs report).

So this week will have a tough time competing with the aforementioned events, and indeed, there are no illusions of outright competition (game changing is reserved for 9/4 - 9/14).  Rather, we could simply see what would otherwise be a fairly flat week get tilted in one direction or another--almost as if it were leading off in anticipation of bigger-ticket events.

To that end, Wednesday and Thursday are the busiest days, each with the more relevant economic data of the week and the more relevant Treasury auctions.  Monday gets things off to a slow start with only the Chicago Fed Midwest Manufacturing Survey in the domestic session, though there are a few decent European data sets overnight as well as a few central bank speeches that could help it feel less like the the end of a 3-day weekend.