David Harrison

During the Q&A with Fed gov Waller, an exchange on how to reconcile BLS data in the rearview mirror with what's happening out the front window on energy prices.... Q: You spoke in your speech a lot about the core CPI print that's coming out today. That is a backward looking print. And I wondered how sensitive the committee were to the recent changes in the Brent price. We were at $118 per barrel a couple of weeks ago. When I left my desk this morning, we were $90. Waller: The oil price will come back down, but I'm telling you diesel prices are not coming back down anytime soon. You don't have refining capacity. You're going to have a lot of oil sitting on ship somewhere, but it's not going to get processed into diesel anytime soon. That's what I mean by just because there's more oil coming out of the Gulf and barrels of oil price, it doesn't mean energy prices are necessarily going to drop in the near term for everybody else. I just don't see diesel coming down dramatically because more oil's coming out of the Gulf. You got to have refining capacity and that stuff's been seriously damaged around the world and isn't going to come back soon. So you can't just look at the price of a barrel of oil. It's like what do you do with the oil and how is that stuff all being affected?