Gary Thayer Last Quotations

I think it's good news for the economy. When you take away the GM strike and average last month's figures with this month's, you see employment growth at moderate levels, which is good for sustainable growth.

This supports the view that first-quarter economic activity is much better than what we saw in the fourth quarter of last year.

We've seen, over the past seven months or so, orders stabilize or improve slightly, compared to a big decline last year. Orders are rising relative to inventories, and that's a positive sign for capital spending.

We've been seeing improvement in the non-manufacturing side since late last year. We're seeing more activity in the travel sector and others that were hit really hard last year after the terror attacks.

If we hadn't heard from Greenspan last week that the Fed is still worried about an uneven recovery, we might be more upset about these numbers. But Greenspan is concerned that these retail sales numbers could falter later on so these numbers probably won't have that great an impact.

It's still a good reading overall, but not quite as robust as we've seen in the last several months. The encouraging thing is that the employment component increased again. We are beginning to see businesses becoming a little more willing to hire.

(The data are) suggesting the decline we've seen in the dollar over the last couple of years is not having an impact. It suggests the dollar may still need to fall to help narrow the trade deficit. But there's a risk to higher inflation if it does.

Inflation is creeping up, but it's not out of hand. I think that's pretty important. The bond market may have discounted a worst-case scenario over the last couple of months on inflation, and now maybe traders won't have to worry about the Fed moving too fast.