02 February 2012 at 14:20 GMT
You know it has been a quiet day when one of our three featured numbers is Eurozone PPI. Nevertheless, inflation at the producer level is declining as projected by analysts and as we commented on in this morning's
Macro Update. Initial jobless claims beat expectations while the Spanish and French auctions saw falling borrowing costs with the auctions oversubscribed at least one-and-a-half times for all maturities and more than four times in one instance.
Government bond auctions
Spain sold EUR 4.56 billion in 3-, 4-, and 5-year bonds.
Source: Bloomberg L.P.
France sold EUR 7.96 billion in 6-, 8-, and 10-year bonds.
Source: Bloomberg L.P.
Eurozone Producer Price Index
Eurozone PPI declines 0.2 percent month-on-month in December, decelerates to 4.3 percent year-on-year. Though consumer prices have maintained a rather high growth rate for quarters now, we do expect them to rise less slowly in coming quarters due to slower economic growth and a fading of the effects from last year's commodity rally.
US Jobless Claims
Initial jobless claims came in below consensus printing 367,000 vs. 371,000 expected though last week's number was revised up by 2,000 to 379,000. Continuing jobless claims also beat at 3.437 million vs. 3.535 million expected and 3.567 million prior. Why the labour market is currently performing above our expectations we do not look for average monthly additional payrolls of more than 150-200,000 this year, likely in the lower part of the range.
