Jim Bianco Quotations

We've got economic strength that is much stronger than most people had expected.

The problem with the Greenspan Fed is that it has been a 'make it up as you go along' Fed. There is no philosophy with Greenspan. He changes his mind about all of this stuff.

What we can do is take the core rate of PPI and combine it with last week's 5 cent-an-hour jump in average hourly wages and say that inflation looks like it is a concern, maybe not a problem yet, but a concern. And the Federal Reserve was justified in raising rates and may be justified in raising rates again in the May or July meeting.

No one has a feel for where the bottom is. The bond market is in a holding pattern waiting to see what the stock market does.

One thing to understand about interest rates is that they're bad in both directions. Having rates at an extreme low is bad. By encouraging them to go further, the Fed only makes it worse.

Now that the GM strike is over, we should see a big rebound in industrial production numbers.

Now that yields are moving up, all these reasons have been shoved aside, and order in the universe has been restored.

If we were to see high wage numbers that have filtered through into higher PPI and CPI, the concerns would immediately go up that the Fed isn't going to more once or twice, but much more than that. And that would not be taken well by the markets.

Greenspan has done a good job of morphing himself into the nation's chief economic officer and chief investment officer. He's been elevated to the status where we can't cut taxes unless Greenspan says we can cut them.

I think the lower rates are going to help buoy the stock market in the face of the worries about Asia and all of the earnings misses that we seem to get everyday.

While the (producer-price) number is positive, one number cannot offset four months of strong numbers. If we get more weak numbers, we could push the idea of a Fed tightening away, but this one number won't do it. I think that the idea that the Fed is going to move is still very much on the table.

While the PPI number is positive, one number cannot offset four months of strong numbers. If we get more weak numbers ... we could push the idea of a Fed tightening away, but this one number won't do it. I think that the idea that the Fed is going to move is still very much on the table.

This week, the question is: Do we need a safe haven anymore, is the worst behind us?

Everything seems to have turned bad for the stock market just in the last 18 hours.

At some point, we will see the returns come back to bonds to compete with stocks. But it doesn't look like it's September or October of '97 for the moment. It looks like that's still a way's off.

So this continues a pattern where the economic community seems to consistently underestimate the strength in the economy.

It's about the stock market, not about the economy.

It's all about the stock market right now. They are in sync with one another in that they're moving in the opposite direction from each other.

It's not so much what bonds need to do. The focus is stocks and what that market does. Stocks need to re-introduce the element of risk and fall 10 percent off their highs to make bonds look good.

The news doesn't come much better than this.

The volatility that we've had in the stock market is higher than we've been accustomed to over the past several months. We've now finally broken into the range where the moves are greater than 1 percent, but as long as they're not 2 percent or 3 percent, we're not in that range where you would start to call them extraordinary.

The consensus is now quickly forming, like it did in July, that the Fed is going to move (rates), and move on September 24. But I'll be a maverick and say they won't move.