Mark Vitner
Mark Vitner
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I think it's going to be a bad month for retailers. The news was so horrific coming out of New Orleans that it made people not feel like going out to dinner.
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It continues to defy all the expectations of doom in the housing market. Demand for housing still remains quite strong and this year will be a record year for single-family construction.
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It (consumer sentiment) was a little higher than expected, but the stock market has come back, gasoline prices have come down, and the weather has been beautiful and that has to affect consumers somewhat.
consumers
It is important to look at what consumers are doing, not what they are saying,
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It's beginning to look like the Fed was right all along ... and that the case for a recession has gotten a lot weaker. It looks like we're going to have a successful bumpy landing.
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The federal response has been much larger than we thought it would be, ... And the money is being spent much more quickly.
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(The Fed) would rather see slower economic growth over the next two years than the return of stagflation three or four years down the road. And I think they'll do everything they have to make sure we don't have stagflation.
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The Fed will probably cut rates in both August and October by 25 basis points (a quarter-percentage point) each. We really don't know what they will do beyond that.
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The federal government is going to spend whatever they need to, to make some visible progress before next year's mid-term elections, ... And what that's going to do to an economy that's already at full employment is drive up the cost of cement, drive up the cost of steel, drive up the cost of labor.
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The Fed can't wait for core inflation to pick up before they act,
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it's somewhat surprising how resilient the economy has been, despite higher energy prices.
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The jobless recovery is well behind us. The economy right now is not really in a recovery mode, it's in a boom mode. Companies are going to be hiring out of fear if they don't, they lose an opportunity to make more money.
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The chance of a rate hike is almost nonexistent. They've never moved this close to the election, and I don't think there's any need to. There's really no denying the economy is growing less than it did in the mid-'99 to mid-2000 period.
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We expect a big jump in consumer confidence now that the effects of Katrina and higher gas prices are further behind us. Higher confidence will lead to a better-than-expected holiday shopping season as well.