Today’s most hotly anticipated data was undoubtedly PCE inflation for January. In fact, this is the report that became the subject of our focus and anticipation immediately following the last CPI on Feb 13. That said, it only deserved focus because it was the best stop-gap data option between CPI and the next NFP on March 8th. Today, it is proving its merit… maybe. It’s actually hard to assign it too much credit for leading a reversal of overnight weakness because a big jump in continued jobless claims (highest since a spike in November that looked like an outlier at the time) arguably deserves some credit. We even had a noticeable reaction to Chicago PMI later in the morning.
One reason for giving Jobless Claims closer consideration is that today’s PCE data ran 10-30 seconds late depending on traders’ preferred delivery platform. That allowed us to see the Claims data having an impact in a vacuum during that time, and a majority of the initial gains were already in by the time we saw PCE come through. The additional drop in yields on the Chicago PMI data is possible evidence that the market is hungry for economically downbeat data. It’s a bit more pronounced than we’re used to seeing for this report, and it would be a surprise to see as much selling if today’s number had beaten the forecast by as much as it missed.
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