Howard Schneider

As a journalist covering this stuff, the bass and the drums are kind of gone from the orchestra right now.

So you're not sure what you're dancing to.

Not only that, but your lead vocalists, in our case, the Federal Reserve, they're kind of patching this all together as well.

They don't know if the unemployment rate has gone up a tenth of a percentage point or gone down a tenth of a percentage point.

They don't know if job growth accelerated in September and October or didn't.

How much did gasoline go up?

How much did the price of meat go up?

So I not only have the absence of the data that we usually report about and then use to think about larger stories, the people who are responding to that data, which is a core bit of the coverage, they're kind of hampered in what they can say as well.

Now, they'll all say, listen, we're not flying blind.

We've got plenty of things to respond to.

But fundamentally, the stuff they usually set policy around, the big benchmark numbers, have been missing.

And that's really stilted the debate.

It's not a lack of data.

The Fed, just like all of us, we're drowning in data.

We're drowning in information.

The question is, is it representative of the country as a whole?

So one of the interesting things you get to do as a journalist is go out and learn about that and try to see if you can patch it together in ways that add, well, we can get goods prices from here.

We may have to turn over here to look at housing prices like the Zillow indexes or the Redfin indexes of the world.

I think the Fed is doing this too.