38 Quotes by Hans Olsen

This is expected to be one of the worse hurricane seasons, and so far they're right and we're only halfway through it. All you have to do is pose the question: What if you had another monster storm in another few weeks, just as things are starting to come back on line? I don't know how you would avoid recession in that environment.

The report is preliminary and it seems to be an outlier. Investors chose to focus on earnings reports.

It's obvious that the hurricanes will drag this number down, and because of that, separating the trend from the noise is going to be hard. When it's hard to assign a meaning to this number, the market will likely just overlook it.

It's remarkable that consumer confidence remains so high and it may help bring to stocks some buying momentum. Companies in the industrial and consumer sectors are the most likely to benefit from high confidence levels at the start of 2006.

The big guys, they won't touch that with somebody's else 10-foot pole, let alone their own.

It's clearly not good, but the market is probably more focused on the economic front.

It's interesting to note the diversity of the companies that are reporting these profit shortfalls. And we're still early into this.

These numbers combined with yesterday's ... gives the Fed a lot of ammunition to raise interest rates and if you have, at the same time, the economy slowing, that's just going to make a really difficult environment for stocks.

It's really the Fed at this point that's kept the market in check. The historic conversation between the Fed and the markets has become a bit of an argument over whether there's really inflation, and whether we need those rate hikes.