Mercifully for a US rates complex struggling to price a wholesale rethink of the likely path for Fed policy in 2024, wholesale price growth was generally benign in March, according to data released on Thursday.

On the heels of another annoyingly warm CPI report, the BLS said PPI prices rose 0.2% last month from February. That was cooler than the 0.3% consensus expected. Maybe there’s a God after all. (I’m just joking. No there isn’t.)

The PPI release constituted good news, even if it didn’t have any hope of negating the hawkish read-through from the previous day’s CPI overshoot. Recall that producer price growth in February was a disconcerting 0.6%. So, 0.2% looked pretty good by comparison. Unrounded, it looked even better: 0.154%.

The PPI equivalent of a “core” index rose 0.2% as well. That was in line with expectations.

There were caveats, of course. There always are. The favorably cool headline read belied a third consecutive monthly gain on the services side led, somewhat amusingly, by a 3.1% jump in prices for investment advice. When you tack on the performance drag versus an index fund such “advice” almost invariably produced, the “drag-adjusted” pace was probably more like 500bps.

Jokes aside, we’re still living in a bifurcated economy from a disinflation perspective. The third consecutive increase on the PPI services gauge was juxtaposed with a 0.1% decline on the goods side, the fifth MoM decline in six.

On a YoY basis, the headline PPI gauge rose 2.1%, the quickest in nearly a year but below estimates nevertheless. The 12-month increase on core was 2.4%, a tenth higher than expected.

Meanwhile, initial jobless claims printed 211,000, below estimates and still indicative of a tight labor market.