David Greenlaw Quotations

The producer price numbers on Wednesday and the productivity number on Friday are the most important events we have ahead of the Fed meeting. There's still some uncertainty in the market about what the Fed will do and those numbers will be key to figuring that out.

Since we believe that the underlying state of the labor market is quite healthy, we would expect any negative weather- related impact on the February data to be recouped in March.

From our standpoint, the change in language represents a small step toward an eventual rate hike.

If the Fed has a bit of an itchy trigger finger, the ECI headline number gives them the excuse to go sooner rather than later. It does increase the odds of a tightening on Aug. 24.

Overall retail sales growth in December should be robust.

While the dissent came as a surprise, we certainly wouldn't read it as evidence of any sort of a significant split on the FOMC.

Virtually everything else in the report was quite strong.

You have a much, much different situation today.

What everyone was wondering was where consumers were getting the money to pay for these things, and I do believe we got part of that answer today.

Even though the pace of starts may continue to edge lower on an underlying basis, we look for about a 6% gain in January.

The resilience of the consumer really shines through in this data.

This is great news on the inflation front. It will be very difficult for the economy to generate any sustained rise in core inflation with unit labor costs showing such a high degree of restraint.

There is obviously a lot of concern about the state of the housing market right now. One thing that caught a lot of people's attention was this nine-year high in unsold homes.

The negative impact associated with the energy shock will be more evident in the fourth quarter even though it hit in September.

I don't think the market is pricing in a big risk of a surprise.

The economy has shown tremendous resilience in the face of energy prices so far. But this latest spike will have a noticeable effect in the next couple of months.