Steven Wieting Quotations

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

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

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

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.

I don't' think we've seen any sign here that there is an urgency to risk damaging the pace of the upturn. Why rush, why panic?

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

There are several large drags, in a statistical sense. The underlying condition is that we're probably losing jobs. But the February and March data are not indicative of how bad it really is.

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

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

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.

I think energy affects us at every price. As we go marginally higher, growth forecasts get marginally weaker,

I think it comes down to the mechanics of how folks were counted.

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.

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.

We're not at gas prices that pose some kind of a tipping point.

We're not at gas prices that pose some kind of a tipping point. There have been botched forecasts of a recession at every $10 move (higher) in crude oil futures.

We haven't had a single year of falling consumer spending since 1938. There's no boom or bust in consumer spending.

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.

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.

The fact is orders just hit a wall in June and July.

Today's data included well-known as well as surprise areas of weakness.

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

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,

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

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

Whether the Fed goes 25 or 50 basis points next week might mean something for managing market psychology, but it doesn't mean nearly as much for the broader economy. Their language regarding their future considerations on rates is what should matter.

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.

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're getting higher and higher oil prices each day and you'll continue to see a larger drag on the economy through the summer months.

Benchmark revisions could completely recast underlying data, in which case January forecasts won't be useful.

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.

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

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.

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 already were expecting a 5,000-job decline in manufacturing employment in May.

This notion that there's just too much tech everywhere contrasts with the fact that there's actually been a spending improvement,

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

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.

At worst it's a wash-out, ... I don't think the fears or the benefits of the dollar's fall are really quite as much as they're cracked up to be.

Even if energy hangs out at these historically high levels, headline inflation should slow down in the coming year.

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

There's no reason for utter despair, but this looks like a big exaggeration.

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.

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,

In some industries, there's no improvement and the economy is not going to help them.

If you can tell me where the next move in oil prices is going to be -- up to $60 a barrel or down to $20 -- I can tell you what the economy is going to do.

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

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.

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.

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

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

After periods of a large slump in employment, there may be advantages to canvassing homes,

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.

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

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.

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.

This kind of sequential recovery, this coming up from the base, has been as good as we've seen in any economic recovery at this stage, but again this is multiyear process,

There's a lot of month-to-month volatility in these numbers, ... You had a tremendous amount of widening in February and then a snap back in March.

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,

However, a much larger drag seemed possible after the October surge, and a good portion of the rise will be offset by a gain in inventories in the quarter.