Pre-market futures are mixed at this hour, more or less at levels we had seen before this morning’s economic reports, of which there are a few. The Dow is -26 points currently, while the S&P 500, Nasdaq and small-cap Russell 2000 are all up: +33 points, +246 points and +4 points, respectively.

Weekly Jobless Claims Improve to Pre-Covid Levels

Probably the singularly most well-behaved employment metric over the past year has been Weekly Jobless Claims, but it appears we are now coming down to historic lows: +198K on Initial Jobless Claims is the lowest since the week of Thanksgiving last year, which was something of a seasonal outlier. This follows a slight downward revision to +207K the prior week. New claims have fallen four times in the past five prints.

Sub-200K Initial Jobless Claims is a big deal. Considering the size of the modern labor force, this is the smallest amount of laid-off workers since 2019 — a year ahead of the Covid pandemic, which changed everything — which itself represented a half-century low in new claims.

Combine this with Continuing Claims, which, at +1.884 million, is sub-2 million in now four of the past six weeks — another indication that the labor market is not only surviving, but thriving. The previous week was revised down from +1.91 million to +1.90 million. Stability in the current labor market even showed up in monthly Household Survey numbers, which showed a tick-down in the Unemployment Rate to +4.4%, the first month-over-month downward move since last summer.

Imports & Exports Improve for November

A headline on Import Prices for November (delayed due to the 6+ week government shutdown late last year) popped up +0.1% from 0.0% reported for September (October numbers were never filed, as they occurred over said government shutdown). This is obviously a positive print, although it comes on overall lower volumes, which is mostly due to seasonal activity.

Exports in November, bolstered by higher prices for fruits and vegetables which brought Agriculture exports +1.3%, came in +0.5% overall in this morning’s report. Year over year, this tallied +3.3%, which came down from the +3.9% September read (see above for what happened to October’s report), the lowest since +3.2% reported in August.

Regional Manufacturing Better than Expected

Both the Philly Fed Manufacturing Survey and Empire State Manufacturing Index are out this morning, both for the month of January. Philly Fed brought the first positive results in four months, to +12.6 from an expected -4.5, with the prior month revised upward to -8.8 from -10.2 originally posted. Empire State reached +7.7, the third month of four in positive territory, and the third month of four with a plus-sign — after five of seven previous months with negative headline prints.

Q4 Earnings Beats Ahead of the Bell

If all this good news is not enough, check out this morning’s quarterly earnings reports:

Goldman Sachs ((GS Quick QuoteGS - Free Report) posted a +19% positive earnings surprise, with $14.01 per share easily surpassing the $11.77 expected. Morgan Stanley ((MS Quick QuoteMS - Free Report) similarly outperformed expectations, +2.68 per share versus $2.41 projected, for a +11.2% surprise. BlackRock ((BLK Quick QuoteBLK - Free Report) brought in $13.16 per share this morning, above the $12.39 analysts were looking for.

We also saw results this morning from global chipmaking foundry Taiwan Semiconductor ((TSM Quick QuoteTSM - Free Report) , which soundly beat estimates on its bottom line: $3.14 per share versus $2.82 in the Zacks consensus, for a +11.35% earnings beat. The company benefited greatly in the quarter from AI infrastructure demand, which it expects will continue in 2026, and shares are up +3.5% at this hour on the news.