Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization
This morning’s third release was Industrial Production from December at 9:15 AM ET. The report showed that output at U.S. factories, mines and utilities rose 1.6% last month, greatly exceeding expectations of 0.4%. That is a sign of manufacturing strength, making it bad news for bonds and mortgage rates. Fortunately, this report is considered to be only moderately important to the markets while the Retail Sales report is labeled as highly influential. Because of that, the markets are more focused on the sales data than this report.