Higher oil increasingly will creep into the indicators. Today, it biased the trade gap higher and pushed up import prices and also impeded the consumer sentiment number. |
Hiring a Fed chairman is like firing a missile. There's no recall button. |
His speeches are well thought out. After Greenspan, he's the one whose comments are most closely watched by the markets. |
His star is shining. People are looking to him as an unofficial chairman. |
I don't think this is going to draw much in the way of the Fed's attention. It was delayed for some time, and nobody from the Fed was complaining. They don't focus on it. |
I think if you look at the way the U.S. economy has developed over the last few months, you still have strong payroll growth, you've got a little bit of inflation pressure and you have very strong income growth. So the actual economy is not all that different from when the Fed started its rate hike cycle. |
I think these minutes ratify the middle view in the markets, not that the Fed's done and not that the Fed's going to 6 percent. |
I think what this does is ratify the Fed's current stance --- moving at a measured pace seems to be the prudent course. |
I would have thought people would have changed their earnings expectations given that higher rates were expected to slow growth. The expectation all along was that because of productivity growth, companies would be able to keep boosting their profit margins, even if they weren't producing as much in goods and services, but that's obviously is not the case. |
If we get more inflationary data, that could bring people back to their senses. Just because the Fed talks about inflation in a benign way one meeting doesn't mean that feeling will be pervasive at the next meeting. |
It puts the Fed in a position they probably don't want to be in, but they'll have to keep raising rates. |
It was exactly as the market expected, with them commenting on both the overall good news and the modest areas of weakness left in the economy. The Fed is on hold until August. |
It's the inflation story, it's there and it's got implications going forward. |
Looking ahead, we can't see what is going to cause a downturn of enough significance to take inflationary pressure out of the economy and cause the Fed to stop raising rates. |
Modestly weaker-then-expected capital goods orders data suggest a slight shift in growth toward Q4 away from Q1 but the simple fact is that the data clearly suggests that factories are going to be humming throughout Q1. |