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goods and reports. And a final read on the second quarter GDP. Rick Santelli is standing by at the CME in Chicago. And Rick, you want to say what you think is happening.
What we've been watching with yields at this point ever since the Fed's meeting.
Well, to me, yields are doing exactly what they should, maybe even not to the extent I thought they would. To me, the yields are going to continue to be firm, especially all durations, all maturities from seven year on. So tens, 20s, 30s. I think they're going to be sticky. And the reason I think they're going to be sticky. Well, just think about yesterday's five year note auction didn't go particularly well. As a matter of fact, the auctions have taken just a slight turn south in terms of demand since the Fed lowered rates. That doesn't sound quite logical, but I think the issue here is simple is that the market has its own view on interest rates. It has its view on supply that's being issued by some of the big economies of the world. And it's going to continue to price long-dated yields at a rate commensurate with the risks associated with buying in and competing with other countries that have very big and rising deficits. I think that we'll see higher yields closer to 4.35 before we'll see a test of 4%.
All right. Here we go in. The data is coming out. Let's see where we're going to begin here. Let's start with the initial jobless claims, shall we? 218,000. Wow. We're expecting a number around 234,000. 218,000. That would be the smallest since the second, third week of July. Third week of July, when it was 217,000. That's definitely going to put a little pop in interest rates and continuing claims coming in on the light side. Still 1.9 million, 1,926,000. And we've been really consolidating right above 1.9 million.
Now let's go to durable goods, shall we? If you look at durable goods headline number. Well, it comes in at 2.9%. 2.9%. This is a whopper. But here's the fly in the ointment. If you look in the rear-view mirror, we see that 2.8 becomes 2.7%. These are August preliminary data points. So it's a give and take. We see that there's a lot of volatility in durable goods because there's a lot of volatility. Things like prices and tariffs and inventories.
Now let's strip out transportation. And what happens is we get a much more normal-looking number, actually much stronger, up 4/10 of a percent. That would be the best going all the way back. Well, last month it was up 1%. Now, if you don't look at that and you take that out, we'd have to go all the way back to last year to get in September to get a higher number. And if we look at Nondefense ex-year, a proxy for business spending, it also comes in at a very strong rate there at 6/10. 6/10 of a percent. That would be comping with last month when it was 1.0. We're really starting to see some strength there. Last month, by the way, downgraded to 8/10. But now we have some back-to-back strong numbers. Shipments, on the other hand, going the other way, minus 3/10.
Now, on the GDP side, this is our third time around the block on Q2. And we see a really solid revision, 3.8%. I'm a bit shocked, to be honest. Usually, the revisions, as you get to second and third, become smaller and smaller. So 3.8% would be the best quarter going back to. And we have to go back a ways here to 4.4. And that was the third quarter of '23. Now, it is important to point out that if you look at the first quarter final, down half a percent, there's a balance there. But the balance is moving in favor of momentum is moving in favor for better growth.
If we look at the consumption side of the equation, also a big revision for 1.6 to 2.5. The price index moved up a tenth, moved up a tenth from 2% to 2.1. And if we look at the core PCE, it moved up a tenth as well from 2.5 to 2.6.
On the trade balance, we know it's a deficit, a little smaller, -85.5 billion. That's an August number. And to put this in context, we've had this series since 1989, and the last 5 or 6 months have seen historic moves. In March, we had the biggest deficit, and that was -161 billion. So it's come down rather significantly. But do remember, if you go back into the early years, pre-deficit, of course, these numbers were significantly smaller.
I'm almost done, folks. A lot of data today. Now let's look at inventories. We'll go over those rather quickly. If we look at wholesale inventories, they came in at minus two tenths. We're expecting a positive number. These are August preliminary. We want to watch inventory levels. We know that we swamped ourselves with inventories. Now we have to watch how they're going to be selling off the shelves. And finally, on the retail inventory side, unchanged. We're expecting a number up 2/10. That's pretty good. Unchanged would equal, in terms of smaller inventories on retail, equaling where we were in April. To find a smaller number, you go into March when it was down 3/10, where we had all that volatility, of course, in front of Liberation. April, I was correct.
The numbers that really shined here, obviously, was that drop in initial jobless claims. We moved up to the 417, 418, almost in a ten-year. And we see that the pre-opening equities, they're still in the red. They're in the red a little bit more, but not heavily. Dow futures are down by what? About down 71 points.
Once again, Becky, I think it's very important to note we want to pay particularly close attention to auctions today. We have the final auction in a seven-year note, an odd maturity. But it'll still give us an idea if investors are holding back. And the only reason they would hold back were still the dirty, the best dirty shirt in the hamper in terms of issuance and solid issuance. And we have our treasury behind it. We have the reserve currency, but that doesn't mean investors aren't going to want a little bit more fo