Jobless Claims & Producer Prices Meet The Mark

The Labor Department’s reports on weekly jobless claims and producer prices are out and mostly in-line with expectations.

Claims came in with a drop of 14,000 to 351,000 and the prior week was revised to 365,000 from a preliminary figure of 362,000. Dow Jones was calling for a drop of 5,000, so after the revision this figure was slightly better than expectations.  The army of unemployed, measured by the weekly jobless claims, fell by 81,000 down to 3,343,000 claims.

Producer Prices, or wholesale inflation, for February was mostly in-line with expectations but still hotter than it has been in several months.  The headline PPI came in at +0.4% and the core rate which excludes food and energy came in at +0.2%.  Bloomberg had a consensus reading expectation of +0.5% on the headline data and was calling for +0.2% on the core rate.

Today’s reports were slightly better than expectations, but they are probably not real market moving data as they were close enough to expectations.

JON C. OGG