TEXT OF INTERVIEW

Steve Chiotakis: Markets here at home are responding to some economic data and polls
out today. And Marketplace’s Jeremy Hobson joins us now from New York with more on those barometers and what people are saying in the midst of this fallout. Jeremy, things are in the green out of the gate — I guess Wall Street’s forgotten about all the doom and gloom in Detroit.

Jeremy Hobson: Yeah, it looks that way, and we’re now back to a busy week of economic indicators, a lot of them coming out this week. The big daddy of them all is going to be the unemployment number for March, which comes out on Friday. Now today, we did have some more bad news from the Case Schiller index of housing prices. Prices declined 19 percent between January of last year and January of this year — which, Steve, was more or less in line with expectations.

Chiotakis: And Jeremy, we have consumer confidence numbers coming out in just a few minutes, right?

Hobson: That’s right, and we may see a little bit of a bounce at the top of the hour on Wall Street. Of course, interesting after the huge drops we saw yesterday. I did speak with Dan Cook a few moments ago, he’s a senior market analyst at IG Markets in Chicago, who provided a little bit of context:

Dan Cook: It’s still really a trader’s market rather than an investor’s market. And whenever we have a trader’s market, we will have a run-up followed by quick profit-taking. And we may have some very positive news today which will pop it back up, but again we have so much, everybody’s still kind of on-edge.

On edge of course, but hoping for some good news on consumer confidence. And that poll from the Washington Post, ABC News this morning, to give us a little clue of what we might see, it found the highest level in the last five years of people who think the economy is heading in the right direction.

Chiotakis: All right, we shall see. Marketplace’s Jeremy Hobson joining us from New York. Jeremy, thanks.

Hobson: You’re welcome.