There was more incrementally good news on the US inflation front Thursday, when the BLS said producer prices were unchanged on the headline in February. There’s a caveat though vis-à-vis the Fed’s preferred measure of consumer price growth. Hold that thought.

Thursday’s was the first unchanged MoM print on the headline PPI gauge since July, and it undershot consensus, which expected a 0.3% gain. The range of estimates from 51 people who, if you can believe it, get paid huge sums of money to guess at economic aggregates with virtually no requirement that those guesses ever be right, was -0.1% to 0.5%.

The prior month’s headline readout was revised to show a quicker advance. The YoY print for February was 3.2%, a tenth lower than consensus saw.

As the figure shows, the PPI services gauge showed a 0.2% decline in February, the first month-to-month drop since November and the most pronounced in six months. The goods gauge printed a fifth straight advance, as a 1.7% MoM increase in food prices offset a decline on the energy index.

Now for the caveat. Wednesday’s pleasantly cool CPI release was marred by concerns around the read-through of less favorable outcomes on categories which “inform” (scare quote alert) economists’ PCE projections. Indeed, despite the core CPI undershoot, and similarly soft reads on the CPI-derived “supercore” measures, Wall Street’s forecasts for core PCE price growth (due on March 28) were actually marked up yesterday, north of 0.30%.

As BMO’s Ian Lyngen noted Thursday morning, “It isn’t often that core-PCE results in a stronger pace of price increases than core-CPI, but February is currently expected to be one of those unique cases.”

The PPI release is watched closely for clues on PCE prices, and although I’m not an expert on the PPI-to-PCE translation, it looked to me like some of the categories which feed into PCE were warm, which may bias forecasts for the Fed’s preferred inflation metric warmer still.

With that caveat, the PPI release probably won’t upset any apple carts. As noted, it technically undershot estimates, and stocks aren’t exactly famous for nuanced responses to incoming data. That’s left to bonds.

Meanwhile, jobless claims for the week to March 8 were 220,000, below estimates. Continuing claims likewise undershot for the prior week. Initial filers in D.C. rebounded, and now sit back near the highest levels in two years. Overall DMV claims (i.e., initial filers in the DOGE “blast radius”) rose meaningfully.

All in all, Thursday’s US macro releases were uneventful outside of the read-through of the PPI release for PCE prices but, as noted, economists had already begun to anticipate a warm PCE print following Wednesday’s otherwise soft CPI report.