What to watch next week: TGT, HD, M, HPQ, GDP and Greece

Next week will be a busy week on Wall Street with a raft of big earnings reports including Target (TGT), Macy’s (M), Home Depot (HD) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) to name just a few.

Investors will also have a lot of economic data and geopolitics to digest this coming week and in the weeks that follow.

The Commerce Department will release the latest reading on third quarter Gross Domestic Product. Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman thinks investors will be watching that report closely, as well as the situation in Greece.

Newman predicts Greece will finally cave in its standoff with its European underwriters over the terms of its debt deal. “I think next week is going to be the week that Greece blinks,” says Newman. He believes Greek officials will “finally say ‘OK, we have to go along with the bailout terms.’” And Newman believes that will lead to a pop in European stocks.

Yahoo Finance’s Aaron Task is looking to our nation’s capital and a couple of looming deadlines as the next potential trouble spots that could rankle financial markets. Funding for the Department of Homeland Security will run out at the end of February unless Congress can come to an agreement to extend funding.

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Task believes this is just the first in a series of contentious debates that will unfold in the next few weeks in Washington.

“I’m looking at this as sort of the under card to the big battle on March 15th when we will be in technical violation of the debt ceiling if a new resolution isn’t passed,” says Task, who goes on to quote former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder’s Wall Street Journal Op-Ed in laying out just how unlikely it is that Washington will reach a compromise:

The granddaddy of all budget deadlines is also in March, when the February 2014 agreement to suspend the national debt ceiling for 13 months expires. If nothing is done between now and March 15—and I guarantee you nothing will be done—the U.S. government will begin breaching the national debt ceiling on March 16.

The Treasury secretary can use a number of gimmicks to postpone the day of reckoning, and experts think such gimmicks can carry us through September or October. Then we’ll witness a serious confrontation of the sort we’ve seen before—a game of fiscal chicken between Congress and the White House.

If Blinder is right and the United States does breach the debt ceiling, Task believes that will set off “all kinds of fireworks in the financial markets.”

What are you watching next week? Post a comment below and let us know what you think will move markets.

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