Jim Bianco Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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