19 January 2012 at 13:48 GMT
A plethora of data from the US has just been released confirming this morning's view that inflation is
decelerating in the US with CPI slowing to 3 percent year-on-year in December as expected by consensus (from 3.4 percent earlier) while Core CPI held steady at 2.2 percent. Housing Starts (-4.1 pct.) and Building Permits (-0.1 pct.) lost some ground in December. Due to November's solid gains these series were likely set for a pullback and that was indeed what happened. We continue to expect that a drawn out recovery is underway in housing, however. Lastly, and most impressively, Initial Jobless Claims plunged by 50,000 last week to 352,000 from an upward revised 402,000 a week earlier. Similar progress was observed in Continuing Jobless Claims, which fell to 3.432 million from 3.647 million. (Despite the solid job numbers we stress that jobless claims are highly volatile during this time of the year.)
Next up are Bloomberg Consumer Comfort and Bloomberg Economic Expectations at 14:45 GMT and Philadelphia Fed Business Outlook at 15:00.
Source: Bloomberg L.P.