Treasury prices are starting off slightly lower in early trading. Earlier this morning, the Mortgage Bankers Association announced that for the week ending April 9th, Mortgage Application fell another 3.7% after the prior week’s 5.1% decline. Purchase applications were down 1.4% with Refis down 5%. The Average Thirty-Year fixed rate was 3.27%.
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we learned that Import Prices rose 1.2% last month versus an estimate of 0.9%. That helped push the year-over-year rate to 6.9% from 3.1%. Analysts were expecting a big jump in the twelve-month rate, but only to 6.4%. Export Prices jumped 2.1% against a forecast of just 1% moving the year-over-year rate to 9.1% from 5.3%. Changing base effects have helped produce these startling year-over-year results as they have similarly affected other price-level measures.
Treasury prices are showing little reaction to this morning’s numbers with the Long Bond yielding 2.31%, the Ten-Year yielding 1.63%, and the Two-Year unchanged at 16 basis points. Crude oil is up almost a dollar to $61.14 with gold little changed at $1,745. Equity futures are mixed.
