Anthony Chan Early Quotations

Today's Fed rate cut and directive clearly reflects the fact that the Fed is coming to the end of its rainbow and therefore wants to ensure that it still can convince financial markets that it still has further flexibility to do more if it needs to.

The momentum going into 2006 is clearly healthy. We will be able to withstand weaker growth for the rest of the quarter and almost not miss a heart beat.

The retail sales figures clearly prove that betting against the consumer is a sucker's bet. Not surprisingly, the ex-auto figure on retail sales tears down the argument that consumers are only buying cars and houses.

These numbers clearly tell me we have not hit bottom in the economy.

This is clearly a non-threatening report for investors and policy makers alike. Labor market conditions appear to be tepid enough to justify less rather than more Fed rate hikes while wage pressures did not spoil the party.

We're starting to see the savings rate pick up from near historic levels, which is very encouraging. Though we don't expect Fed tightening to work overnight, we are starting to see some of the early results of the significant tightening we've seen to date.

Saying that higher oil prices have not increased the risk of recession or serious economic slowdown is clearly not the same thing as saying that they have not had an impact.

What the Fed showed was that extraordinary circumstances require an extraordinary strategy. Not only are they moving rates to lows not seen since the early '60s, they're prepared to move them a lot lower.

We still see limited penetration into the rest of the economy. It's too early to say you're seeing pricing power to pass on the energy cost increases just because you saw just a jump in the core PPI number. The world has changed. In the old traditional world, whenever you had mature expansion, you had pricing power. Today with globalization, that's no longer the case.

Anything that causes people to spend more time thinking about what they do will clearly have an impact on productivity. The good news is this is not a permanent situation -- these things have a way of clearing themselves up. But will it be completely inconsequential? I don't think so.

The labor market seems to be improving, but still at such slow pace, it's probably too early to start celebrating.

Clearly when you speak of an economic slowdown, you usually talk of an unemployment rate that is much, much higher. This environment is just not right for a recession,

Even though, internally, I think they are probably debating it, it's just too early to make an announcement to publicize that debate.

The jump in payrolls this month shows that although the economy clearly went through a wider-than-expected soft patch, it does not appear as though the shortfall in growth was permanent,

This clearly shows that relying on the household survey's employment measure as a barometer of labor market conditions is not only risky, but also an incorrect assumption,

This puts to rest any question of whether or not we're going to have an explosive recovery. We're clearly not.

I think this report clearly shows that we got a hurricane bounce back. It also puts the possibility of a Fed rate hike in December back in play.

We may very well be in the early stages of a profits recovery that will eventually pave the way for healthier capital spending growth,

We have almost 500,000 people in the New Orleans area and you have a less than 80,000 increase in claims. We are going to have a lot more than that. Clearly a lot of people can't yet file claims.

If the manufacturing sector remains mired in a recession mode for too long, it may be signaling the same for the rest of the economy. Although it may be a bit too early to make that assessment, there should be universal agreement that the ISM outcome certainly does not bode well for the rest of the economy.