Bloomberg (10/17/14) Danielle Trubow

The Thomson Reuters and University of Michigan October preliminary consumer confidence index for the U.S. rose to 86.4 from a final reading of 84.6 the month before. The reading is the highest since July 2007. The 67 economists surveyed by Bloomberg had forecast a reading of 84.0. Job gains for the year are expected to be the strongest since 1999.

Wall Street Journal (10/20/14) Jon Hilsenrath; Pedro Nicolaci da Costa

The U.S. Federal Reserve plans to stay the course as it prepares for the next policy meeting, despite current market volatility and uncertainties about the global economic outlook. The central bank’s bond-buying program is likely to end on schedule as officials hold their Oct. 28-29 meeting, and officials likely will debate whether they need to fine-tune the central bank’s assessment of the labor market and its guidance on interest rates.

San Francisco Fed President John Williams indicated that he expects the economy to grow at a 3% annual rate in the second half of the year and into 2015, with the jobless rate continuing to fall and inflation gradually rising to the Fed’s 2% goal.

Wall Street Journal (10/19/14) Pedro Nicolaci Da Costa

At its upcoming meeting, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston president Eric Rosengren says, the U.S. Federal Reserve will end its bond-buying program, noting that it could hold off on raising interest rates if overseas weakness takes a bigger-than-expected toll on the U.S. economy. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Rosengren said that “being focused on getting labor markets back to where we think full employment is is, I think, the most tangible way that monetary policy can impact income equality.”

Although he did not give a time line, he said the central bank should begin raising short-term interest rates when the economy is one year away from full employment and at the 2% inflation target. “We tend to talk in terms of the U-3 measure of unemployment, but the reality is the part-time for economic reasons is still quite high relative to what we’ve historically seen at this kind of unemployment rate. To me that indicates that there’s a good chance that even if we got to 5-1/4%, we still may have more labor market slack than we’ve had historically,” Rosengren said. “We do want to get inflation back up to 2%, and if we need tighter labor markets than we’ve historically needed in order to do that, then we should allow the unemployment rate to drift further down.”