Why is Janet Yellen so optimistic or more optimistic?
Right? Well, let's take a look at those
comments from Yellen. So she was speaking to us
and saying that essentially she sees the risk of anything
of a recession going down. And I'm sure she's
looking at, you know, actually some, some
pretty promising data that's come out fairly recently out of
the US, we saw some home home construction data
earlier this week. That was pretty strong suggesting that
that's going to contribute positively to GDP growth in the
second quarter. We also got some pretty good retail
sales data pretty regularly. But um it's also these
, these comments are pretty interestingly timed because she also
just said that the labor market has been resilient.
And at the same time, we have this new
jobless jobless claims data that suggests that jobless claims are
remaining quite elevated. Um I do want to say
, you know, Bloomberg, Bloomberg economics took a
look at some of this and said yes, like
, you know, some of that data is,
some of the jobless claims are really concentrated in just
a few states. Um And ultimately, even though
they see the labor market is cooling off. They've
described it as kind of a gradual cooling this year
. So, and I will also point out that
Bloomberg economics has pushed back their, their expectations for
a recession a little bit, seeing something may be
hitting in the back end of this year. But
I think what all of this is really telling us
is that, you know, this is a very
sort of tricky situation, you know, we've seen
with Jay Powell, you know, just talking to
lawmakers this week and even what he said in the
FC press last week that, you know what the
fed is doing to target inflation, how it's balancing
that against the economy and, you know, whatever
the economy's resilience may be, that's all a very
sort of flexible situation. And I think that that's
really important to keep in mind here as we get
these kind of new comments from Yellen about the state
of the economy as we look at all of this
data is that ultimately, it's just going to be
a very interesting year ahead as we sort of plot
out how exactly the economic outlook works here.