NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - A very busy week ahead on the political economy front!

The Federal Reserve is expected to hike its key rate at the end of it's two-day meeting on Wednesday, just hours before the President's State of the Union address, where we are supposed to at long last get details of his Social Security plan, including his vision of personal accounts.

And then on Friday comes the jobs report for January, which is expected to show some respectable gains.

Even more economic reports will be piling up early in the week for the Fed to mull over, including today's on Personal Income and Personal Spending for December. Economists knew going into the report that the income number would be hugely distorted by Microsoft's $32 billion dividend pay out. So don't be fooled by what suddenly looks like people making a lot more money: some people -- Microsoft shareholders -- did, most of the rest of us did not, though incomes are growing enough to support decent spending.

Perhaps more importantly, that report contains Fed chief Alan Greenspan's favorite inflation indicator: the PCE deflator. It is rising at a rate well under 2% annually, which is probably one reason why some folks at the Fed are NOT getting more worried about inflation.

Nerdy though it may sound, one of the key issues for the markets this week in the coming flurry of information will be to see how the Fed talks about this question of rising inflation in its policy statement on Wednesday. It will be interesting to see if the inflation hawks at the Fed succeed in stepping up the inflation alert and prepping the markets for more aggressive rate hikes in the future, or if the doves reassure the markets that measured rate hikes will remain the order of the day.

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-- Kathleen Hays is economics correspondent for CNN and contributes to Lou Dobbs Tonight.