U.S. Housing, Ifo, RBS, Allianz Earnings: European Week Ahead

By Stefanie Haxel

Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Reports on the U.S. housing market and consumer confidence, business sentiment in Germany as well as earnings from Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, Telecom Italia SpA and Allianz SE may move European equity markets next week.

The Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index lost 6.7 percent this week to 178.40 as of 12:53 p.m. in London as companies from Daimler AG to Anglo American Plc posted disappointing results and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner failed to convince investors that his plan to rescue U.S. banks will work.

“It is far too early yet to get a meaningful bounce in enough of the indicators to give us any confidence that the economy is improving,” ING Groep NV economists including James Knightley wrote in a research report dated yesterday.

The U.S. Conference Board is set to release its consumer confidence index for February on Feb. 24. The measure declined to the lowest level on record last month as jobs evaporated and home values sank.

Germany’s Ifo institute will publish its business climate index for February the same day. The gauge may show a reading of 83.1, little changed from the previous month, according to the median estimate of economists in a Bloomberg News survey.

Figures on existing homes sales in the U.S. in January will be released on Feb. 25, while a report on new home sales in the same period is due for publication a day later.

“A sustainable recovery depends on fundamental data from the housing and labor markets and should therefore take another while,” Steffen Neumann, a Mainz-based strategist at Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg, wrote in a note to clients today.

Earnings Watch

Royal Bank of Scotland plans to report full-year results on Feb. 26. The biggest U.K. government-controlled bank has about 22 billion pounds ($31 billion) of real estate loans that are secured on properties now worth less than the amount loaned by the lender, analysts at JPMorgan Cazenove Ltd. wrote in a report to clients published yesterday.

Allianz, Germany’s largest insurer, and BASF SE, the world’s biggest chemical maker, are also scheduled to report results that day. Telecom Italia, Italy’s largest phone company, is due to publish earnings Feb. 27.

To contact the reporter on this story: Stefanie Haxel in Frankfurt at shaxel@bloomberg.net.