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We head into the last week of August this week and while this may be a light week overall, there are some pretty important economic numbers coming out, as well as a couple key earnings reports.

Monday morning starts us off with existing home sales data, which will be interesting to track since the new home sales data came in above expectations on Friday and propelled the rally in stocks. Tuesday morning the monthly report on consumer confidence will be released. The market is expecting a rather large drop in consumer confidence so it will be interesting to see if that comes to fruition. Tuesday afternoon at 2 pm we get the all-important FOMC minutes from August 7th. Sure you might think that since they will be three weeks old at that point they don't matter, but that is very wrong. The market will be reading into every word that was spoken at that meeting, looking for clues to what the FOMC's thinking was and likely will be. Thursday morning we will get the preliminary GDP data for quarter 2, in which the market expects 4.1% growth.        

Though earnings releases have certainly slowed down there are still a couple of pretty major releases this week. Chico's FAS Inc (NYSE:CHS) and Coldwater Creek Inc (NASDAQ:CWTR) will basically close out the specialty retailing earnings releases this Wednesday. Specialty retail actually helped propel Friday's rally due to low expectations and better reports. The largest earnings report of the week belongs to Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) which will report Thursday after the bell. Dell really needs to provide a strong number since many of its closest competitors such as Hewlett Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) and Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) have set the bar so high.

This week is liable to be quite light on the trading volume for all the major exchanges, but there are certainly some important numbers being released this week that the prudent investor will pay close attention to.