While concerns about inflation swirl, the evidence continues to give those fears little substance, |
While consumer spending has sparked up a bit recently, linking it to better output growth is still highly speculative. |
While everybody is very happy with the performance of the economy under Greenspan, it's come at quite a price. We have a negative savings rate. The consumer has been out spending his and her income, partly supported by an increase in housing prices, where people had to pull a lot of the equity out of their home. Well they can't do that again. |
With all this uncertainty, should we really trust (the Fed) to be preemptive, to cut off inflation at the pass when they clearly don't know where the pass is? |
Worker productivity generally creates a scenario where employees realize they can begin to demand more for what they do. While the year-over-year productivity gains are still quite good, there is some evidence that wage inflation may be starting to creep in. The Fed won't like this. |
You can make the case that bad things happen in October. |
You can't repeal the laws of economics. Wages in China are so cheap, that you'll never make labor cheap enough in the United States to compete with that. |
You count up the products (showing price increases) and you see there's a little more pressure just below the surface, ... The overall energy number showed a big decline. That covers up a lot of ills. But the PPI was the warning shot across the bow. With the CPI report we dodged the bullet. |
You don't need an economist to tell you how disastrous they look. |
[The figures] fell in the largest markets, and where they fell, the bottom dropped out. In the West, sales plunged by 29.4 percent, a figure so large it is hard to believe. In the South, sales fell by 6.4 percent. These are the two biggest markets. |