Robert Brusca Overall Quotations

We tend to look at this and the Philadelphia index as an indication of what is going on in the overall economy. Most disturbing is that order backlogs are running over 50 percent, which is the glorified neutral. It's at 6 percentage points below, that's bad -- it shows companies are cannibalizing orders to move ahead.

So while some special factors may be boosting spending, the overall trend of spending is well out of line with income growth. This tells us that this spending trend is unsustainable unless consumer income growth picks up sharply.

The consumer still has life. It does temper the overall gain, but we're still going to see the consumer spending this quarter.

You count up the products (showing price increases) and you see there's a little more pressure just below the surface, ... The overall energy number showed a big decline. That covers up a lot of ills. But the PPI was the warning shot across the bow. With the CPI report we dodged the bullet.