When I was a kid, my parents would say that I only heard the things I wanted to hear. Fast forward 22 years of marriage and I can’t remember a single time my wife has made the same accusation. So either I’m getting better at listening…or I’m not.
We humans are funny like that. Our brains are amazing at keeping the engine that keeps them alive–that is, the bodies that house them–as comfortable and safe as possible. Sometimes that means our noggins are going to tell us to put on a jacket, eat, or sleep, or run…or maybe disregard waves of sound that attempt to pass through the auditory meatus to the auditory cortex where the gyrus in the temporal lobe decides what to do with it. Most of the time the aural stimuli gets processed by the gray matter rattling around in our skulls instantaneously and we react accordingly.
But sometimes, like six year old Jeremy, we only hear what we want to hear. The Fed is being accused of selective hearing loss by many right now as they are speaking around the globe about the need to resume raising interest rates as early as next month. All measured economic sectors have seen 50% expansion reductions over the last year save one: Labor.
The labor market today is stronger than at almost any time in recorded history. Unemployment Rate? Robust. Job Expansion? Substantial. Payrolls have beaten expectations for a record 14 months in a row. The next Jobs Report will be issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in two weeks from today. As of right now it’s literally expected to be business as usual, but if there’s any hint of precursory weakness in the sector, you can bet that the Fed will be strongly encouraged from every armchair economist and at large media mogul to forego their widely publicized plan to resume the systematic 0.25% jumps toward the pending recession. I’ll probably be one of them.
But maybe they won’t hear a word about it.
