Steven Wieting Quotes (39 Quotes)

If demand stays strong and productivity growth slows considerably, this could be a year that could be seen as heading towards traditional overheating of the labor market, with big employment gains.

The Fed has assumed that the weakness in the first quarter was temporary. This confirms that. The reasonable view was you don't have a one-third rise in energy prices without consequences.

It's one of those rare Goldilocks reports, ... The idea here that there is still potential slack, the pool of available labor.

Exports were flat for a second month running and that has been what is most broken in the trade picture.

Freeing up less productive resources by accomplishing more with less is the entire basis for rising living standards. It shouldn't come as a surprise that stronger periods of economic growth have generally begun during periods of high unemployment, not low unemployment.

Business conditions are really slack. The latest rally in stocks doesn't change that.

It will be a long time until anybody thinks the economy is stretched and can't produce enough to match demand. We could be dealing with it for all of 2004, certainly.

The reaction to this data in the past would have been much more positive. These days only bad news is carrying weight.

September was a month where we thought there was a tremendous amount of weather impact,

That kind of decline is a perfect fit with what we've seen in the household survey's measure of employment, ... if not in February, then in future benchmark revisions.

Many of the understandable sources of recovery have been expended in the first half of 2002, leaving growth drivers into 2003 a mystery.

The consumer's role in this upturn is going to be the opposite of his role in the downturn.

Consumption is growing, government outlays are growing and the third quarter will look very strong. But going forward, business spending is flat and decisions are being deferred. That can keep us weak for the near term -- neither contracting nor expanding.

The fact that we can lower living costs at a time when output and income are recovering should be considered fantastic news.

There is no change in course, and markets have already priced in more action.

It takes a lot of confidence to buy cars and homes people don't make that kind of decision on a whim.

While we don't take monthly changes in employment too seriously, today's data were slightly stronger than expected on hiring, but slightly weaker on hours and utilization, thus providing a 'growth positive' outlook.

We saw a lot of healing going on in 2002, and nobody gives any credit to it.

It comes down to a political choice, ... whether this is the kind of thing where you happily wait and continue unemployment insurance in the hope that certain industries bounce back cyclically, or you accept the fact that certain job categories are gone for good.

Beneath the surface, production and inventory, here and abroad, are moving up faster than the rate of demand growth,

Seeing a two-year low in confidence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina isn't that surprising. The news in the month of September has been terrible. The television coverage and the emotional impact of the story has a big effect on confidence in the short run. But spending has been inconsistent with these confidence numbers.

It's very unlikely for Fed to worry about month to month data changes, or even two months, as the markets do.

What's most important is that we've got demand and supply moving ahead fast enough that we're absorbing and creating jobs month in and month out -- that's not something to lament.

We continue to expect a long, successful business cycle expansion amid well-known challenges. However, visibility has been somewhat reduced, and the Fed is not fighting off increased market expectations of policy tightening.

This is not entirely comforting but you'd need a lot more information than one month's PPI at the turn of the year to worry about inflation,

It's more of a victory lap. Literally a month ago people were arguing that prices would not stop going up. Now, data we would have killed for two years ago is seen as the end of the world. But alarmists on both sides of this thing have been shown to be wrong.

Year-end financial markets can be difficult, and winter economic data is difficult to read, ... It makes more sense that December will be month they skip. You don't want to be raising rates into what can be an illiquid market.

Friday's number is not going to make much of a difference for the outlook for the economy.

Some of the conditions that have ripened the growth outlook at the start of 2006 are unlikely to last into spring. Abnormally warm weather boosted construction activity in December. ... Judging by a 46,000 gain in construction employment in January, the winter 2006 will go down as an unusually early and strong period for building activity.

If you look at labor demand, you should be getting a decent trend. It was only June data that fell below that trend.

The Labor Department gave guidance that workers held on payrolls would be counted as employed, even if they couldn't be on the job. Just assuming that everyone in New Orleans was out of a job was not the way to go.

He has time over time noted a single month of economic data is a poor guide to the future,

Estimates have to come down, ... We're in for an ugly preannouncement season.

While the U.S. economy is still transitioning, and will for some time, data that should be supporting confidence in the recovery have not worked to ease investor concerns. We have to wonder if markets won't derail an otherwise quite healthy recovery in much of the core of the U.S. economy.

Years from now, new benchmark revisions will come along and change the whole picture again -- which begs the question of how important these monthly payroll changes are. I think it's irresponsible to make too much of these reports.

We had unintentional inventory declines in the second and third quarters, which is what you would typically get in a recession. I think companies will need to build 50 billion per quarter in inventories, even if the demand growth rate is just 3.5 percent.

We're not expecting an entirely clean read for the durable goods report. The business confidence data began to bottom at the end of June and that's encouraging. We probably will see modest gains in consumer activity and eventually the business cycle will catch up to that. But so far, everything right now is pointing to frustrating moderate economic growth for the time being,

This gain in proprietors' income is small-business job creation, we think, and it's more useful at this point in the business cycle than it would otherwise be,

This is a fairly big negative, correlated to other unfortunate news, like weak financial markets, which have their own impact, ... So far it still looks like the economy is growing, but below trend.