Thursday, August 22nd, 2024
Pre-market futures are keeping mildly positive this morning, as they were yesterday at the closing bell. We do have seasonal lower volume overall, so it's nice to see the moves at these levels remain in the green. The Dow is up another +45 points, the S&P 500 +11 and the Nasdaq +63 points at this hour. Bond yields are also cooling slightly: 3.83% on the 10-year, 3.97% on the 2-year.
Jobless Claims Stay Well-Behaved
This being Thursday morning, we see new Weekly Jobless Claims flattish with last week's tallies. Initial Jobless Claims of 232K last week were a smidge higher than the 230K expected, and a tad more than the inched-up revision of 228K the prior week. Back at the end of July, we saw a jump to 250K on new claims, which appeared to signal something of an unraveling in the labor market that was not to be — at least not yet.
Continuing Claims, reported a week in arrears from new claims, reached 1.863 million, above the slightly revised 1.859 million ...
