00:00Of course, everybody wants to know what the Fed's going to do. The Fed's worried about jobs, and
00:03today you had a number to worry about. Yeah, it's a tough mess on the jobs report today.
00:08You never want to over-index on one month's report, and I've been consistently saying let's not index
00:16on total payroll employment anyway, because a lot of stuff is going on with immigration,
00:22with population growth. That said, you saw the unemployment rate inching up, and it's one month
00:31that's not a trend, but it's not a good month. If you got several months like that, that'd be a
00:37concerning spot for the labor market. Well, what's your feeling about what the Open Market
00:42Committee is going to do? I know you've been waiting to see data. Chris Waller has been saying
00:47he's still in favor of cutting, as is Stephen Myron. Where do you come down now? Well, as you
00:54know, and I appreciate you asked it that way, I'm not allowed to speak for the committee or for anybody
00:58else, just myself. I've been saying for some months that we've had relative steadiness in the job
01:07market, in my view. The strongest thing in the economy is not AI data center investment, has been
01:13consumer spending being solid in a kind of a broad-based way in the economy, but the inflation
01:21hasn't been ideal. It's at least stalled out at kind of three percent, and some of the latest measures,
01:30the inflation disturbingly high in non-tariff categories like services. I think we're still
01:37basically in that same spot. I remain hopeful slash expecting that conditions will improve,
01:47that we'll start to see some progress on inflation, head us back to two percent, and by the end of
01:53this
01:53year, that we would be in a situation that we could commence our march back down to something like
02:00the settling point, which is below where we are today. But each time we add an uncertainty,
02:08I think the job market characterized by low hiring simultaneously with low layoffs is a weird
02:19combination. And when I talk to business people out in the Midwest, they characterize this because
02:25of the uncertainty. So as we get more uncertainties, I kind of think the time at which it makes sense
02:32to act keeps getting pushed back. I always say the first rule of the data dogs is to recognize there's
02:40a time for sniffing and there's a time for walking. And when there's uncertainty and you're getting
02:47conflicting data points, that's the time for sniffing.
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