It's very unlikely for Fed to worry about month to month data changes, or even two months, as the markets do.

We haven't had a single year of falling consumer spending since 1938. There's no boom or bust in consumer spending.

If gas prices are just holding steady and not increasing, and if incomes are rising, your gas bill is the same, and [consumer] demand can rebound. That's the most likely scenario here.

The Fed has assumed that the weakness in the first quarter was temporary. This confirms that. The reasonable view was you don't have a one-third rise in energy prices without consequences.

We already were expecting a 5,000-job decline in manufacturing employment in May.

I don't' think we've seen any sign here that there is an urgency to risk damaging the pace of the upturn. Why rush, why panic?