Anthony Chan Head Quotations

But what we've seen is if you hit the economy over the head enough times with higher energy prices and short-term interest rate hikes, it reacts.

The rise in the unemployment rate takes much of the sting away from the robust gain in payrolls from a monetary policy perspective. The big fear ahead of the release of this report was that labor markets were overheating.

This would provide another pillar of support for the view that the economic recovery in the year ahead is likely to be gradual,

I think we're headed in the right direction.

The outsized gain in housing starts was influenced by the same variable dominating most of the other headline stats like the retail sales and industrial production, namely weather. Everyone knows that housing starts is a volatile number that generally reports wide swings.

This confirms fears that the economy was growing slowly, but it doesn't absolutely mean we are headed for a double-dip recession.

The key number was not the headline (overall CPI) number,

The initial knee jerk reaction was a powerful rally in the morning. As cooler heads prevail, it's clear it's still a positive for equities, but the question is whether it is strongly positive or mildly positive.

It's unreasonable to expect that the information we have so far could justify another cut right now. We need to see more evidence the economy is headed for much slower growth in the months ahead.

We've seen a sea change in the way the financial markets and economy watchers are looking at the world, ... For many months, people thought the economy was so strong and robust, they could ignore these head winds.

The headline number is encouraging, but if you strip out the volatile components and look at core growth, it's telling you we're turning the corner, but we're not running around the corner.

Even though the headline number came in much stronger, it isn't the number investors are going to be focusing on.

It would have been a lot more comforting to see greater strength in the ex-auto component than in the headline figure.