Anthony Chan Percent Quotations

I don't have any doubt it's going to bite. The debate is whether it'll bite enough to cause a recession, and I don't think so. Because the economy remains fairly strong, it can withstand these one-two punches. If we were growing at 1 or 2 percent and we got this same one-two punches, the ref would tell everyone to go home.

Given that we import more than 50 percent of our oil consumption from abroad, it is clear that as these prices rise, we are essentially transferring net wealth from U.S. consumers to oil producers that are mostly located overseas.

We're not going to get the 1.5 percent productivity growth necessary to produce all those jobs. Such a fall-off would be out of line with what normally happens.

We produce less than 50 percent of all the energy that we consume.

We're coming off 6 percent consumer spending growth in the fourth quarter, and that's going to moderate. It's not going to collapse, but see we spending in the neighborhood of 2 to 3 percent for the rest of the year.

The prospects of 4 percent real GDP growth (or possibly more after future data revisions) during the third quarter are back on the table,

When one looks at the MBA data that reveal that applications for the purchases of new homes are down 7.5 percent on a year-over-year basis, it is not hard to see that the gain reported this month is not a sustainable trend.

We will see more bad news on the employment front. We see unemployment going to 6.1 percent or 6.2 percent before it's over; no way are we going to see that coming down while we're creating so few jobs.

Preliminary estimates indicate 60 percent damage to downtown New Orleans. Plenty of cleanup work and rebuilding will follow in all the areas. That means over the next 12 months, there will be lots of job creation which is good for the economy.

About 70 percent of the average cost of producing a product is wages,

These numbers tell us that the underlying productivity surge observed in recent years remains alive and well. If productivity could rise by 1.1 percent during a sluggish growth environment, imagine what can happen once the U.S. reverts back towards trend economic growth.

If you have productivity growing faster than the economy, how can you expect demand for labor to be all that strong? I'm still hopeful that unemployment won't go much higher than 6.2 percent or 6.3 percent, but where we'll peak is not as important as when we turn around. If we sort of linger at 6.2 percent, that will put some downward pressure on consumer spending.

I think a 0.2 percent decline in economic growth due Katrina's impact on oil and the regional economy is a realistic assumption,

You typically see, from the trough of a recession to the time when the recession ends, a 1.3-percent gain in payrolls, ... From when the recession likely ended, in December of last year, we've had 0.004 percent gain, instead of that 1.3 percent gain. There's a pent-up demand for labor, given such a jobless recovery.