Howard Schneider

The food inflation was the biggest in a few years.

So that's not great news for consumers or for the Trump administration heading into midterm election year.

But the tariff pass through seems to be kind of crawling to an end.

So you should get some disinflation and should pave the way for, you know, one, two, some are even saying three rate cuts this year.

Here's the issue.

It's really going to take until April before the data is clear of the noise from the shutdown.

So even though this is a pretty Fed positive report, it's not going to change the outcome for January, which seems pretty baked in in a pause.

No reason to make a call on rates yet.

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.