Data Watch - April 16

CANADA

manufacturing shipments bounced 2.2% higher in February from January's 5.3% drop, about as expected; the bounce was due to a rebound from the auto sector, as ex-autos shipments were down a modest 0.2%; total manufacturing sales remain down 14.5% YoY; the inventories-to-shipments ratio improved a bit from its 17-year high of 1.61x in January to 1.56x

CPI will be released Friday at 7

U.S.

housing starts and building permits were expected to retreat a bit after February's bounce, but not by as much as they did; in January, starts hit a low of 477k, then bounced to 583k, while permits hit a January low of 531k before regaining ground to 564k; they were both expected to come in for March in the 540-550k range, and given the NAHB's blip up yesterday, conjecture was that perhaps the risk was to the upside; not so, however, as starts fell to 510k and permits fell to a new low of 513k; single-family starts were stable, while the one-month decline was attributable to a 29% drop in multi-family units

its Thursday, so its jobless claims day; initial claims were at 654k last week, the 6th-straight week over 600k, but down from the March 27 high of 674k, and have now fallen further to 610k, versus the expectation of 660k; on the other hand, continuing claims continue to set new records (though not yet on a population-adjusted basis), now exceeding 6 million; having climbed to 5.84M last week, they were expected to be just under 5.9M this week, but rose to 6.02M; the shortened week for Easter may have had an impact on the initial claims number

after Empire made a bigger claw-back towards 0 than expected, having come in at -15 vs. the expectation of -35, it will be interesting to see if Philly does similarly; it was -35 in March and the survey says that -32 is what's expected for April

UPDATE: Philly Fed report revealed that the "region's manufacturing sector contracted less severely this month", as the index was -24, the 16th time in the last 17 months that the index was negative


INTERNATIONAL

Chinese Q1 GDP came in lower than expected, having fallen from 6.8% YoY to 6.1% YoY

Chinese inflation is underwater; the producer price index is down 6% YoY (further down from February's -4.5%), the consumer price index is down 1.2% YoY (better than February's -1.6%), and the purchasing price index is down 8.9% YoY (from -7.1% in February)

the good news is that Chinese retails sales remain robust, up 14.7% YoY, as expected, and better than at the end of February (11.6%) though down from the peaks of about 23%

and though Chinese industrial production YTD was worse than expected, up just 5.1% YoY, for the full trailing year its up a more-than-expected 8.3% YoY (though that's down from 11% at the end of December)

Japanese machine tool orders still down 85% YoY through March

Eurozone CPI was up 0.4% MoM and 0.6% YoY, while core CPI is up 1.5% YoY

Eurozone industrial production was down 2.3% MoM in February (January was revised up a bit from -3.5% to -2.4%), and YoY its now down a bit-worse-than-expected 18.4%