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,

We’re getting higher and higher oil prices each day and you’ll continue to see a larger drag on the economy through the summer months.

This notion that there’s just too much tech everywhere contrasts with the fact that there’s actually been a spending improvement,

The soft patch was highly overrated,

Many of the understandable sources of recovery have been expended in the first half of 2002, leaving growth drivers into 2003 a mystery.