Bill Cheney Rate Quotations

Looking ahead beyond the current gloom, there is a serious risk that we already have inflationary forces baked into the system. By late spring, the Fed could be cranking up interest rates even faster than they cut them.

It would be kind of like when they put through a substantial emergency rate cut when the market crashed in 1987. I don't think it is evidence of panic to treat what happened yesterday as an emergency. It's an emergency on many levels.

This is kind of number that will let the Fed relax and keep cutting rates as long as they see a need.

We're still several months away from job growth catching up with labor force growth and driving the unemployment rate back down, but that's really just a matter of time. Our economy is moving again, and once that happens it's actually quite hard to stop the forward momentum.

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.

At this point I am guessing that the Fed is pretty committed to raising rates in January but after that all bets are off.

The rise in wages of 6 cents might cause jitters, but wage inflation is less of a worry now, especially with productivity still growing at a healthy clip. As the economy slows, the unemployment rate will continue to inch up and wage pressures should ease further.

Sooner or later rates will have to come back up to at least a 'neutral' level. But for now they've got the monetary policy lever just about where they want it, and it makes sense to do as little as possible for as long as possible.

I don't think the Fed is under pressure to raise rates faster than they have been but I think they'd be crazy to think that they should be done tightening.

Unless we're missing something, the unemployment rate will be shooting back up again very soon.

Today's rate cut was no surprise. Even the half-point cut was more or less expected. In fact, the economy is still weak enough for the Fed to feel free to keep easing.

In principle, rapid productivity should make wages rise, but it seems that until the job market tightens up a bit, all the productivity gains flow to corporate profits.

We were expecting to celebrate New Year's and instead got slapped with a pink slip.

I'd say there's only a 25 percent chance of a rate hike in June even. Even with another strong jobs report Friday, they'll want to have something that looks more definitely like a trend.

When demand does start to rebound, the Fed will have to deal with the delayed effects of a year of aggressive monetary stimulus. Short-term rates will almost certainly have to rise faster and farther than seems credible today. Of course, this is a problem that we now feel we would enjoy facing.

The moment they think there are jobs there, they'll be out looking and the employment rate will start heading up again. I think that's on the whole a good sign at this point in the cycle.

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.