After Wednesday’s near 2% drubbing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) spent Thursday doing something stranger than falling: very little.
A 6.5% YoY Producer Price Index (PPI) print, rising jobless claims, and a President promising to seize Iran’s main oil terminal added up to a close only fractionally lower, which says plenty about how numb this tape has become
The session was anything but calm, with an early dip below the 50,000 handle bought hard and the index running to the 50,350 area through the European morning. The 12:30 GMT data dump knocked it back toward 50,100, and a New York-open spike just shy of 50,400 was sold within minutes, leaving the Dow near 50,200 at the close. An inflation report built for arguments The headline numbers were ugly: producer prices rose 1.1% MoM for a second straight month, lifting the annual rate to 6.5% against a 6.4% consensus and 5.7% prior.
The core gauge told a different story, adding 0.4% MoM against 0.5% expected and holding at 4.9% YoY when forecasters looked for 5.4%. Initial claims rose to 229K versus 219K expected. Bulls are leaning on the core miss as proof that underlying disinflation survived the war, which is a thin branch one day after the Consumer Price Index (CPI) printed 4.2% YoY, its fastest pace in three years.