It's still a good reading overall, but not quite as robust as we've seen in the last several months. The encouraging thing is that the employment component increased again. We are beginning to see businesses becoming a little more willing to hire.
The bond market had been thinking that the weak economic numbers that we've seen would cause the Fed to think twice about raising rates,
If we'd had a substantial decline in the dollar against the Chinese currency we'd have probably seen a substantial rise in the price of some of the items that we buy from China.
We had seen the daily and weekly sentiment surveys show a small dip in consumer attitudes at the end of January. Some of that could have been related to the late January rise in energy prices.
It looks like we will have about a half-million lost jobs from the hurricanes and we have now seen the lion's share of that.
It suggests our manufacturers are adjusting to a new environment and will continue to grow, ... I think we have (already) seen the worst for manufacturing.
(The data are) suggesting the decline we've seen in the dollar over the last couple of years is not having an impact. It suggests the dollar may still need to fall to help narrow the trade deficit. But there's a risk to higher inflation if it does.
The good news is that what we've seen is an unchanged reading for the nonpetroleum items and it looks like what we're still seeing is lower prices for many consumer items.
The good news is that what we've seen is an unchanged reading for the non-petroleum items ... so it doesn't look like we have a major inflation problem outside of oil, which is good for the Fed.