Diane Swonk

And it's not just housing market wealth.

Equity in your home cannot be as easily tapped.

But wealth in the stock market has moved up dramatically.

And that is important because it's not filtering down to workers and

the dichotomy of those two things happening at the same time, the hard part is that it keeps inflation buoyed as well.

And I think that's something that the Fed is going to be watching for.

And we know that, as you heard earlier, I think Eric pointed it out, if these losses that we saw in jobs last year were more structural,

then cyclical in nature, then rate cuts don't help them.

If they are more demand-driven and the rate cuts actually help to reignite employment, that's great, although they don't usually work quite this quickly.

So I have my doubts about that.

I think we are working through some big uncertainty issues that finally abated a bit, but measures of uncertainty moved back up again in the month of January.

Even though the vote itself was sort of buttressed by yet another two dissents in favor of additional cuts, what we heard from the chairman was how broad the consensus was to pause now, to wait and see what's going to happen yet.

And even during the course of the press conference itself, we saw Chair Powell say, you know,

that inflation would come down.

That's our base case.

But he really ended on a very strong note saying that they would not prematurely declare victory over inflation because that's something they've already done and they didn't want to repeat that mistake.

No, the economy is growing rapidly.

The problem has been the labor market doesn't match it.

And he laid that out also in his comments saying, you know, usually when there is such tension between the overall economy and the labor market, the labor market wins.

And that was interesting as well.