Friday preview: China activity data for March in focus

The market spotlight at the end of the week will shift back to Asia, where a slew of economic reports are scheduled for release.

Included among those are readings for gross domestic product in the first quarter, alongside data on employment and retail sales, industrial production and fixed asset investment for March.

Consensus is for a 6% drop in the rate of growth of GDP over the three months ended on 31 March, following growth of 6.0% over the prior three-month stretch.

But some economists, like those at Barclays Research, were forecasting a drop closer to 15%.

As an aside, analysts at Morgan Stanley had reportedly recently estimated that unemployment in China could jump by roughly 80m people in the very near-term, with unemployment focused on the country's manufacturing sector.

Friday 17 April

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