Lara Rhame Sees Quotations

The markets are trying to put this data in the context of how scared the Fed is by it. It's very difficult to see exactly what the Fed views as a continuation of last year's trend of broadly declining price pressure and what the Fed sees as a substantial decline.

We saw the unemployment rate actually holding throughout most of this slowdown, and only about four months ago we were at a 4.5 percent unemployment rate, ... The average recession sees a lot of job losses, so we've got a lot of catching up to do.

You can really think of productivity as magic fairy dust to sprinkle over growth to allow growth without inflation. That's really the way the Fed sees it.