April Industrial Production Higher

April Industrial Production was just issued and the numbers are promising, rising 0.8% during the month. The Federal Reserve previously said that production grew 0.2% in March.

The rates of change for both January and March were revised up, but the rate of change for February was revised down; nevertheless, the cumulative change over those months was only slightly lower than previously reported.

The capacity utilization rate for total industry advanced 0.6 percentage point to 73.7 percent, a rate 6.9 percentage points below its average from 1972 to 2009, but 4.5 percentage points above the rate from a year earlier.

The SELECT SECTOR SPDR INDUSTRTIALS ETF (NYSE: XLI) was flat in the pre-market after this report.