Thursday: Unemployment Claims, CPI

Goldman economists on inflation:

The next piece of inflation news is the August CPI report, to be released on Thursday. We expect a 0.20% increase on the core and a 0.36% increase on the headline. Two special factors—a rebound in hotel prices and a price increase by Verizon—account for about 0.05pp of our core forecast.

Looking further ahead with our bottom-up forecasting model, we expect core PCE to round to 1.5% by October, the last core PCE report before the December FOMC meeting, and to reach 1.6% by end-2017 and 1.9% by end-2018. The acceleration in our forecast is driven by (1) pass-through from energy prices and the dollar; (2) declining slack; and (3) the dropping out of earlier idiosyncratic declines that appear unlikely to be repeated next year.

Thursday:
• At 8:30 AM ET, The initial weekly unemployment claims report will be released. The consensus is for 300 thousand initial claims, up from 298 thousand the previous week.

• Also at 8:30 AM, The Consumer Price Index for August from the BLS. The consensus is for a 0.4% increase in CPI, and a 0.2% increase in core CPI.