Mining Prices Rose 27.9%. Consumer Goods Fell 0.1%. Both Came Out of the Same Release at 01:30.
China's October producer price index printed 5.7% year on year against the 5.3% forecast this desk published seven hours earlier, while consumer prices printed 0.7% against a reported 0.8% consensus — the sign right on both, the magnitude wrong in opposite directions, and the two indices now 5.0 percentage points apart. The finding is in the sub-indices: mining and quarrying +27.9% (from 25.4), raw materials +11.6 (9.4), production materials +7.4 (6.5), processing +3.5 (3.4), consumer goods −0.1 (unchanged). A 27.9% input shock is absorbed in full between the mine and the shelf, so this is a margin event, not an inflation event, and the obvious reflation trade is precisely wrong. Raw-material purchase prices +7.9%, also the most since June 2022; prices rose in only half of thirty major industries, with coal mining, oil and gas and fuel processing among nine contributing over six percentage points. The consumer miss is a vegetable story — food −2.9% against non-food +1.5%, fresh vegetables −16.9%, pork −8.6%, the food group dragging the headline 0.48 points. Three readers give three different driver lists. Three publishers also give two different release dates for one print. The transmission that matters is Wednesday's Japanese corporate goods price index at 23:50 UTC and the BOJ Summary of Opinions at 23:50 tonight; London gets the European version of the same bill at 07:00.