I haven't seen much fuss made over tomorrow's FOMC Minutes yet, and that mostly makes sense.  After all, asset purchases were ended at that meeting, and there wasn't likely much debate as to whether or not it should happen.  The only other major change was to the general tone of the policy statement, and to this end, there are a few potential wild cards concerning the inflation outlook.  We'll talk more about those tomorrow morning, but I bring it up now for two reasons.

First, there isn't enough potential drama in tomorrow's data to suggest that markets are fixated on it--not by a long shot.  Second, to whatever extent the dialogue on inflation is now becoming the flavor of the month (it seems that we've "arrived" in terms of labor markets, as far as the average Fed speaker is concerned, but that we have a long way to go in terms of inflation), reports like this morning's PPI may finally start registering a market response.

It's been years since this report has mattered even a little bit. To be blunt, that probably won't change today.  The inflation we're looking for can't be driven by rising prices at the producer level.  The impact of producer price inflation would simply be thinner margins and lower growth, thus counter-intuitively casting a vote for lower rates.

Far more potent than the domestic scheduled economic data will be things like European scheduled economic data and the ongoing saga of the corporate debt calendar (companies can manage risk while they're issuing their own debt by selling Treasuries, thus creating bond market volatility).  As always, these are double-edged swords for bond markets, but thankfully, if the impacts happen to be negative, it stands a good chance to be more negative for Treasuries compared to MBS.  Here's how that looked yesterday as MBS held in positive territory despite moderate losses in Treasuries:

2014-11-17 outperform


MBS Pricing Snapshot
Pricing shown below is delayed, please note the timestamp at the bottom. Real time pricing is available via MBS Live.
MBS
FNMA 3.0
100-02 : +0-00
FNMA 3.5
103-14 : +0-00
FNMA 4.0
106-07 : +0-01
Treasuries
2 YR
0.5120 : +0.0000
10 YR
2.3360 : -0.0040
30 YR
3.0620 : -0.0020
Pricing as of 11/18/14 7:30AMEST

Tomorrow's Economic Calendar
Time Event Period Forecast Prior
Tuesday, Nov 18
8:30 Producer prices mm (%) Oct -0.1 -0.1
10:00 NAHB housing market indx * Nov 55 54