Although the Fed denies it, conventional wisdom suggests that major policy changes tend to be announced at the Fed meetings that include the post-announcement press conference with Yellen.  The thinking is simple.  Big changes could lead to bigger market volatility without Yellen there to answer questions.  With this in mind, market participants aren't expecting any major changes to be announced at next week's Fed meeting.  That's probably a safe assumption.

The Fed meeting is nonetheless a focal point in the coming weeks.  Even if we're not likely to see any major changes announced, there's always a possibility that the text is changed in such a way to somehow inform a rate hike timeline.  Beyond that, there actually is some incredibly small chance that we see a big change, and markets have to account for that.  (To be perfectly clear, there really is no chance the Fed hikes rates next week, but somewhere, some trader is holding back until that can be ruled out.)

What does this week do for us in the meantime?  I haven't been too shy about pointing out several technical trends that suggest some short term concern.  These haven't resulted in anything overly negative yet, and that's good.  But they're still intact, and still represent a threat if they're not broken.  The most significant thing about this week is that bonds will be starting out right up against all three resistance lines in the following chart (inflection point at 1.86, long term downtrend and intermediate uptrend). 

As we saw last week, the economic data--while good for short term motivation--didn't change anything in the bigger picture.  If there was a bias, it was toward strong data doing more to push rates higher than weaker data did to push rates lower.  We won't even have the luxury of observing that phenomenon this week as data is stone silent until Wednesday.  Even then, we'll only get a few middle-tier reports before Friday's upper-middle tier Durable Goods data.  Even that will be discountable due to inconsistent weather effects of the March manufacturing rebound.