Even if energy hangs out at these historically high levels, headline inflation should slow down in the coming year.

What’s most important is that we’ve got demand and supply moving ahead fast enough that we’re absorbing and creating jobs month in and month out — that’s not something to lament.

Today’s data included well-known as well as surprise areas of weakness.

We haven’t had a single year of falling consumer spending since 1938. There’s no boom or bust in consumer spending.

It takes a lot of confidence to buy cars and homes; people don’t make that kind of decision on a whim.

We already were expecting a 5,000-job decline in manufacturing employment in May.

This is not entirely comforting but you’d need a lot more information than one month’s PPI at the turn of the year to worry about inflation,

He has time over time noted a single month of economic data is a poor guide to the future,

Whether the Fed goes 25 or 50 basis points next week might mean something for managing market psychology, but it doesn’t mean nearly as much for the broader economy. Their language regarding their future considerations...

We continue to expect a long, successful business cycle expansion amid well-known challenges. However, visibility has been somewhat reduced, and the Fed is not fighting off increased market expectations of policy tightening.

The reaction to this data in the past would have been much more positive. These days only bad news is carrying weight.

Consumption is growing, government outlays are growing and the third quarter will look very strong. But going forward, business spending is flat and decisions are being deferred. That can keep us weak for the near...

The Fed has assumed that the weakness in the first quarter was temporary. This confirms that. The reasonable view was you don’t have a one-third rise in energy prices without consequences.

It’s one of those rare Goldilocks reports, … The idea here that there is still potential slack, the pool of available labor.

For markets that have recently priced in ‘nearly immediate’ Fed tightening, [Friday’s] data suggest more breathing room, even as tightening is likely to take place when recovery is more deeply entrenched.

It will be a long time until anybody thinks the economy is stretched and can’t produce enough to match demand. We could be dealing with it for all of 2004, certainly.

September was a month where we thought there was a tremendous amount of weather impact,

In some industries, there’s no improvement and the economy is not going to help them.

It’s very unlikely for Fed to worry about month to month data changes, or even two months, as the markets do.

At worst it’s a wash-out, … I don’t think the fears or the benefits of the dollar’s fall are really quite as much as they’re cracked up to be.

The fact is orders just hit a wall in June and July.

If you can tell me where the next move in oil prices is going to be — up to $60 a barrel or down to $20 — I can tell you what the economy is...

Year-end financial markets can be difficult, and winter economic data is difficult to read, … It makes more sense that December will be month they skip. You don’t want to be raising rates into what...

Beneath the surface, production and inventory, here and abroad, are moving up faster than the rate of demand growth,

It’s more of a victory lap. Literally a month ago people were arguing that prices would not stop going up. Now, data we would have killed for two years ago is seen as the end...

It comes down to a political choice, … whether this is the kind of thing where you happily wait and continue unemployment insurance in the hope that certain industries bounce back cyclically, or you accept...

[By his lights it didn’t make sense that stocks were unable to hold onto most of their gains Tuesday, finishing the day roughly flat after a jump early on.] The reaction to this data in...

There are several large drags, in a statistical sense. The underlying condition is that we’re probably losing jobs. But the February and March data are not indicative of how bad it really is.

Benchmark revisions could completely recast underlying data, in which case January forecasts won’t be useful.

There’s no reason for utter despair, but this looks like a big exaggeration.

If you look at labor demand, you should be getting a decent trend. It was only June data that fell below that trend.

That kind of decline is a perfect fit with what we’ve seen in the household survey’s measure of employment, … if not in February, then in future benchmark revisions.

This [gain in proprietors’ income] is small-business job creation, we think, and it’s more useful at this point in the business cycle than it would otherwise be.

Freeing up less productive resources by accomplishing more with less is the entire basis for rising living standards. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that stronger periods of economic growth have generally begun during periods...

I think energy affects us at every price. As we go marginally higher, growth forecasts get marginally weaker.

I think it comes down to the mechanics of how folks were counted.

Years from now, new benchmark revisions will come along and change the whole picture again — which begs the question of how important these monthly payroll changes are. I think it’s irresponsible to make too...

After periods of a large slump in employment, there may be advantages to canvassing homes,

Some of the conditions that have ripened the growth outlook at the start of 2006 are unlikely to last into spring. Abnormally warm weather boosted construction activity in December. … Judging by a 46,000 gain...

We saw a lot of healing going on in 2002, and nobody gives any credit to it.

We had unintentional inventory declines in the second and third quarters, which is what you would typically get in a recession. I think companies will need to build $50 billion per quarter in inventories, even...

The Labor Department gave guidance that workers held on payrolls would be counted as employed, even if they couldn’t be on the job. Just assuming that everyone in New Orleans was out of a job...

The fact that we can lower living costs at a time when output and income are recovering should be considered fantastic news.

This is a fairly big negative, correlated to other unfortunate news, like weak financial markets, which have their own impact, … So far it still looks like the economy is growing, but below trend.

If gas prices are just holding steady and not increasing, and if incomes are rising, your gas bill is the same, and [consumer] demand can rebound. That’s the most likely scenario here.

Friday’s number is not going to make much of a difference for the outlook for the economy.

There’s a lot of month-to-month volatility in these numbers, … You had a tremendous amount of widening in February and then a snap back in March.

Exports were flat for a second month running and that has been what is most broken in the trade picture.

I think we can do better,

This kind of sequential recovery, this coming up from the base, has been as good as we’ve seen in any economic recovery at this stage, but again this is multiyear process,