Steven Wieting Data Quotations

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.

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

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.

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,

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.

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

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

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.