Bill Cheney Month Quotations

I think the economy's momentum is still upward, but the data that have come out in the past month have weakened my confidence in that prediction. I haven't changed my forecast, but I've become a lot less certain about it.

I think this report will lead the Fed to be much more aggressive than we would have expected a month ago. An inter-meeting cut seems far more likely now, and a cut at the May (policy makers) meeting seems all but certain.

We knew that it was a wet month and that rain tends to keep people away from shopping, so I thing a large part of this is actually a weather story.

This is a series that bounces around from one month to the next. There's enormous potential for particular incidents -- the weather, the timing of Easter, the release of a new movie -- to push retail sales around from one month to the next.

It takes something on the order of 150,000 new jobs a month to absorb the natural increase in the labor force. As long as we keep getting smaller positive numbers than that, the unemployment rate should be trending up rather than down.

But you have to come back to the fact that another good month is another good month. And that is good news for the economic recovery.

The unemployment situation won't truly improve until businesses increase hiring a lot more than they did in February. It takes roughly 150,000 new jobs per month just to keep the unemployment rate steady, as population growth increases the work force.

All the evidence on consumer confidence would tell us that all spending on big-ticket items is liable to plummet in the next month or two.