After a very fine session on Wednesday (the best since January 31, and therefore the second most positive of the year), a few 'adjustments are taking place.

The pretexts justifying yesterday's easing remain quite subjective: the US CPI was judged to be "not as bad as it could have been" (37th month of inflation at over 3%) and Europe is revising its inflation forecasts downwards (with very little evidence of an upturn between now and the end of the 1st half).

In the United States, import prices climbed by +0.9% last month, following a 0.6% rise in March. This is their biggest increase since March 2022... a far cry from the 0.2% expected: it would be surprising if Europe escaped the same trends of rising import prices.
Prices of imported petroleum products rose by 2.4% in April, following a 5.4% jump in March, but the rise also concerned industrial materials (+2.7%) and agricultural food products (+2.2%).

Yields stabilized on Thursday, with our OATs and Bunds posting +1.5pts (vs. -11pts the previous day) at 2.458% and 2.957% respectively.

In the US, 10-year T-Bonds rallied by +2pts to 4.373%, and the 2-year by +5pts to 4.784%.

The deterioration in T-bonds was slightly amplified by the release of a 5.7% rebound in US housing starts in April compared with the previous month, to an annualized rate of 1,360,000, following a 16.8% decline in March.
On the other hand, U.S. building permits - thought to be a precursor of future housing starts - fell by 3% to 1,440,000 last month.
Finally, weekly jobless claims contracted by -10,000 to 222,000, a score that suggests a situation of "full employment" which could push up wages.

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