Lara Rhame
Lara Rhame
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I think it's too soon to call for a bottom simply because history has shown us that with this currency, it's a tough bet.
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A lot of people don't understand that the ISM number is not actually an output number. It's the equivalent of consumer confidence, but for businesses. So certainly outlook has improved, but it remains to be seen how clearly that will translate into actual activity.
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This whole question of the impact on interest rates is really complicated, but a lot of smart people at the Fed and elsewhere have said it's not really a big issue -- it's only suppressing long-term interest rates at the margin.
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There can be a circular effect -- if consumers lose confidence and businesses are nervous that the consumer will stop spending, and they downgrade production expectations or lay people off or stop hiring people because they don't think they'll get revenue, that makes consumers more nervous.
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This really puts the spotlight very acutely on the Fed minutes this afternoon.
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This really reduces the chance of a cyclical bounce in spending, which is what we typically expect to see in a recovery.
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This was an honest-to-goodness better-than-expected report. There were no special factors in it that made it look artificially strong. The report also indicates that consumer fatigue may not be as severe as we had previously thought.
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We had a massive jump in the Conference Board measure of consumer sentiment last month, and everybody will be looking for confirmation of that improvement in the Michigan survey.
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We've never seen how this index behaves in a recovery; we've never seen it in anything but a downturn. It doesn't surprise me that we'd get record levels, now that manufacturing is recovering.
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What the current deficit does is make the dollar vulnerable. It means we could see a vicious cycle, where a declining dollar makes U.S. assets less attractive to foreign investors, which weakens our assets further, which puts further pressure on the dollar.
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Today's report was a case of familiar culprits -- apparel prices continue to put downward pressure on inflation, and housing and medical care continue to put upward pressure on inflation.
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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.
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We are still seeing some slack in the labor market, in several different places.
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We're not pricing in rate hikes any time soon, and today's data won't change that. Inflation is off the radar screen for policy makers.