Diary: Australian Miners, US Earnings

Australian miners and interest rates, US quarterly earnings, Spain's struggles and the IMF's latest economic outlook for the world and major economies will dominate headlines here and offshore in the coming week.

In Australia, it will be a week to test the health of the resources sector with giants like BHP, Rio Tinto, Fortescue Metals, Santos and Woodside reporting quarterly production and sales data.

They will tell us how the resources boom is travelling, and more importantly, give us a clue as to if the weak pricing for some commodities (but not so much oil) is having an impact on production and sales.

Rio Tinto and Fortescue release their reports tomorrow: for Rio it's a first quarter report, for Fortescue it's for the third quarter.

BHP Billiton releases its third quarter production and sales report on Wednesday.

BHP declared force majeure on its Queensland coal exports two weeks ago and with more industrial trouble expected soon, the company will be bracing itself for a hit to earnings in its coal division.

It announced the closure of its high cost Norwich Park mine in central Queensland last week.

On Thursday first quarterly production data will be released by Woodside Petroleum and Santos.

Other quarterly reports will come from Grange Resources, Petsec Energy, Resolute Mining and Western Areas NL.

Other meetings this week include Mantle Mining Corporation Ltd, Alkane Resources Ltd; Capral Ltd, Hastings Diversified Utilities Fund, Australand Property Group Ltd, Otis Energy Ltd, Mineral Deposits Ltd; Stellar Resources Ltd, Modun Resources Ltd and Nimrodel Resources Ltd.

Whitehaven Coal Ltd and Astron Ltd hold extraordinary general meetings, where shareholders in both groups are scheduled to vote in relation to their proposed merger.

The Commonwealth Bank's strategy update is due on Thursday, along with the first quarter sales update from Harvey Norman.

Elsewhere in Australia, the main focus will be on interest rates with the minutes from the RBA's last board meeting released tomorrow.

The AMP's Dr Shane Oliver says the minutes are "likely to affirm that it has become a bit more dovish with growth now seen as running below trend leading the way to a May rate cut providing March quarter inflation data due on April 24th remains benign".

Later today, we get lending finance figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Tomorrow sees new car sales data for March released by the ABS.

On Thursday, National Australia Bank will release its business conditions index for the first quarter.

Friday sees the ABS detail international trade price data for the first quarter, ahead of next week's March quarter inflation figures.

In the US the March quarter profit reporting season will ramp up with 91 companies due to report this week.

Among the groups due to report are giants like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Blackrock, Intel Corp, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola Co, DuPont, Microsoft, The Travelers Companies Inc, Verizon Communications Inc , American Express Co, General Electric Co, and McDonald's Corp. EBay, IBM, Bank of America, Halliburton, Morgan Stanley and Advanced Micro Devices and Yahoo.

The AMP's Dr Oliver says the consensus in the US is for operating earnings to have risen by 5.4% year on year.

"Negative profit warnings having been running fairly high lately so there is a good chance that the actual outcome will be stronger than this," he wrote on the weekend.

In the US, retail sales data for March are out tonight, a survey of home builders, surveys of manufacturing conditions in the New York and Philadelphia regions, and housing starts and permits and existing home sales.

Industrial production data for March is out Tuesday night, our time, from the Fed.

The IMF releases its (northern) Spring edition of its World Economic Outlook on April 17, ahead of meetings later in the week of the G20 finance ministers, the IMF and the World Bank.

In Europe, March quarter consumer price index data for the UK will be released, as well as the retail price index for the period.

Average earnings data for April are also out in the UK, as well as retail sales for March later in the week.

ILO unemployment figures are out this week as well.

And the UK's biggest retailer, Tesco, releases its March half year results (expected to be weak) and a new corporate strategy.