The market jitters in advance of the Federal Reserve’s comments this afternoon are made worse by mixed economic messages around the globe. Overnight, it became quite apparent that the Greek government will miss its next big payment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) without any bailout deal in place. This move would ultimately push Greece into technical default. Greece is due to make a €305 million (or $339.07 million) payment on June 5^th, followed by three others in the following two weeks (see list below). The Greek government doesn’t seem too concerned about it for now, but failure to make contracted debt repayments could result in the Greek banking sector being cut off from the European Central Bank (ECB) for any kind of funding in the future. If Greece does default, this raises much of the same concerns as 2011, where many feared that Greece would become the first domino to fall, ultimately leading to the crash of the euro. For now, the world can only sit back and watch.

On the other side of the world, Japan is making a sizable recovery from its recent economic slump. The world’s third-largest economy expanded its gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.6% over last quarter, and came in well ahead of the 0.4% consensus growth estimate. This put the annualized GDP at 2.4%, which was well above the 1.5% economists were looking for. Ultimately, the growth was organic, supported by private demand as businesses increased spending, boosting inventories and personal consumption was better than expected. Certainly something we would love to see here. Below is a chart of the recent history in Japan’s historical GDP growth.

Today’s Session

At 2:00PM EST, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) is scheduled to release the minutes of its previous meeting, held three weeks ago. The FOMC has changed dramatically in the transparency of its operation as the group now discloses policy changes at the end of each meeting. Historically, the Fed used to keep investors guessing about policy changes and Fed officials did not appear on the speaking circuit as frequently as they do now – the major bank presidents are out speaking constantly giving clues about the attitude of the body. Earlier this week, Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President, Charles Evans, spoke to a group in Stockholm, Sweden and noted that despite the continuation of weak economic data in the US in recent weeks, there is still a possibility that the Fed will hike interest rates in June. This is what the market fears, however, it remains to be seen how rocky the market could get today.