Ron Hill Fed Quotations

Obviously, the tech wreck has some effect on the consumer because the slowdown has affected (spending). The Fed has less work than we had thought before.

Retail sales is the single best indication of overall demand in the economy. It's one of the things the Fed is keying on because (of) when they started raising interest rates.

I don't think you want to fight the Fed going into the end of this year.

Everything's playing into the idea that the stress in the economy is beginning to ease. The Fed will take that bias away from inflation and make their risk assessment more balanced between inflation and growth. I think in all of the major indexes the bottoms have sort of been made here in October, and now we're ready to advance. I don't think it's a huge advance...trends are definitely in the investors' favor.

We also like some of the others from the cyclical areas like in the industrials, some of the freight companies like FedEx and ... also in the consumer discretionary, automobiles still look like they're good, ... Traditionally they will outperform until the Fed begins to raise interest rates and Mr. Greenspan has postponed that for a few months. That gives companies like General Motors a little bit longer to run.

The bank stocks are affected by what the Fed does. If the Fed's going to be pushing rates up aggressively, it's going to hard for bank stocks to significantly do better than the market, ... But I think some of the stocks are cheap enough that they're worth at least nibbling on at this point.

I think next year is going to be a reasonably good year. When the Fed starts lowering rates, even though profit growth will be really poor, often some of the best gains in stocks come when earnings are doing poorly, because you're getting a lift from price-to-earnings ratios rising.