Bill Cheney Quotes

"Given the absence of core inflation, it seems to me as good a time as any to pause and see what's happening for a few months rather than overshoot and risk a recession."

"If there is a danger, it is that the report isn't capturing creative and hidden ways employers are boosting wages. I'm sure Greenspan has a sneaking suspicion that these kinds of things are happening and that they may at some point provoke a burst of wage inflation."

"Regardless of what happens to energy prices and interest rates, homebuilding is going to happen and that's going to affect the national statistics but not by a huge amount ... it sort of disappears in the context of the national economy."

"But that's still largely a hope, not a certainty."

"Many businesses see statistics showing economic growth as a cruel joke. Competition is still brutal, wages are still rising, prices are still flat or falling, and profits are as hard to find as they were a year ago."

"Monetary policy is the perfect instrument for these circumstances. The Fed can keep pushing as needed, but still can turn on a dime and pull back as soon as spending starts to rebound."

"Even though it's improving, there's still an awful lot of people who dropped out of work force and are waiting to be pulled back in."

"Rising unemployment, ironically, contains good news. It signals people who had given up and dropped out of the work force are back looking for jobs. Clearly, they have hope there are jobs to be found."

"We're still looking at job growth, but not enough to prevent unemployment from rising. If there were no special factors explaining this, it would be a rather dramatic piece of news."

"What worries me the most is a slip backward becoming a spiral downward. Jobs are the linchpin of both consumer confidence and consumer spending. We can't sustain many more losses like this without that downward spiral getting started. This is the kind of data that could make the Fed think about easing again."

"Now we're starting to see that wash out, and we're seeing that the labor market really has been gradually strengthening for most of the first half of this year. And this is fundamentally good news for consumers and for the health of the recovery going forward."

"While the labor market may feel like the weakest link in the recovery, really it's the last link. As long as employment doesn't collapse, the recovery will continue to gain strength. As it does, slowly jobs will be added and they will be the fuel that kicks the economy into a higher gear."

"The retail sales number is perhaps more important than it would look at first sight. Since we're coming so close to the Christmas shopping season when most of the retail sales of the year happen, anything that represents a gauge of consumer sentiment and consumer buying patterns is going to be latched onto by the retail industry as an important indicator."

"Looking ahead beyond the current gloom, there is a serious risk that we already have inflationary forces baked into the system. By late spring, the Fed could be cranking up interest rates even faster than they cut them."

"I think the job market is on a roll."

"This is a series that bounces around from one month to the next. There's enormous potential for particular incidents -- the weather, the timing of Easter, the release of a new movie -- to push retail sales around from one month to the next."