But it looks like Mr. Greenspan is saying the slowdown in the economy will be short-lived and that suggests that the Fed will probably continue to raise rates.

We’ve been seeing improvement in the non-manufacturing side since late last year. We’re seeing more activity in the travel sector and others that were hit really hard last year after the terror attacks.

It does show consumers are in a buying mood,

We have the potential for that.

We’re still in a seasonally weak period of year, where companies are trimming workforces. It weighs on people’s minds when they hear about companies cutting back.

Overall, confidence is still at a healthy level, up from where it was a year ago, but we did pull back a bit from the three-year high that we saw in June.

I wouldn’t disagree with some of the things he said, but I don’t know why he said those particular things at this time.

The weakness was primarily in the residential area. That’s consistent with the other data we’ve seen recently that suggest that the housing market is cooling off.

The Fed will overlook the strength in the economy before Katrina and focus more on getting the economy back on its feet and probably will hold policy steady until we see how the economy is...

We did see a big recovery in (producer) prices, but that was primarily in energy. Core prices increased only modestly and that’s good news for the Fed.

The PPI numbers generally have been running higher than the CPI numbers, showing that the higher production costs are not being passed on.

Productivity numbers on a quarter-to-quarter basis are very volatile. The downwardly revised second-quarter numbers could easily be revised upward in the third quarter.

Looking back, it is understandable why the Australian and New Zealand currencies peaked in early 2005. That was about the same time that the demand for crude oil also started to moderate.

It shows that consumers are feeling poorly about the economy, similar to what we’ve see in other recessions. Confidence is not as low as it was in the recessions of the early 1990s and early...

We think the economy is poised to slow down and that’s good news for the Federal Reserve.

We probably won’t see good (employment) numbers in the next couple of months because of the loss of jobs in the Gulf Coast region,

The Fed may be looking at oil prices as a reason for the economy to falter and not a reason for it to overheat, so they won’t want to raise rates yet,

The upturn in confidence is an encouraging sign that economic conditions are stabilizing after the hurricanes. Lower energy prices are helping, but the upturn in employment is also a plus.

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...

The jobless claims drop shows good strength in the labor market at the end of the year. It shows that the economy has recovered after the hurricanes and is heading into the new year with...

We got good news on inflation. People anticipate that with inflation still very low, the Fed will stay on hold for awhile.

We were anticipating that we could see a little bit of an improvement in October because the rebuilding after the hurricanes appears to have started and energy prices have stabilized, but it appears that it...

The (February) manufacturing report was a little better than expected, showing continued growth in manufacturing.

With the focus on the Federal Reserve, the PPI is probably more important to the market.