Bill Cheney Coming Quotations

You are seeing a large number of people coming out of the woodwork because there are jobs to be found. People are now looking for jobs because it is now worth looking.

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.

If unemployment sticks at about 6.0 percent and starts coming down, the Fed will probably feel it has to start tightening fairly soon.

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.

We're not only stuck in a soft patch; we're spinning our wheels. To get back to full employment, we need a lot more demand, and that's hard to see coming anytime soon from either domestic or international sources.