Good Jobless Claims Meet Tame Import/Export Inflation

The only bad news we found in the weekly jobless claims data is that the already bad 385,000 claims initially reported last week was revised higher to 388,000.

Another report on Thursday morning was the import and export prices as a preliminary look at inflation. This was for March, and it showed that export prices were down by 0.4%, versus the 0.1% gain that had been called for by Bloomberg. Import prices also fell by 0.5% in March, but that was by and large in line with expectations of the Bloomberg consensus.

The report on imports and exports should keep inflation expectations somewhat subdued. On Friday we get a report from the Labor Department on producer prices as a measurement of wholesale inflation, and Bloomberg has a prediction as of now at -0.2% on the headline PPI and a gain of 0.2% on the core PPI, after stripping out food and energy.

Futures are fighting to find real direction this morning as the S&P 500 futures are up 0.30 and DJIA futures are down two points.