As more and more inflation data rolls in, many on Wall Street continue to debate as to when the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates and what the ramifications of their policy decisions will be.

Ross Mayfield, Investment Strategy Analyst at Baird, joins Yahoo Finance to give insight into why he is feeling more bullish on the state of the economy and why he believes a soft landing is likely.

"I think the soft landing is still the base case. I think it's still likely. I mean, inflation is back down to 3%. Core PCE is annualizing over the last 6 months at close to 2%. CPI ex-housing, is 1.5% and we just printed two of the better quarters of economic growth outside of recession recovery in the last couple of decades. I don't know where we declare that the soft landing has happened, but if it hasn't than it's still in the base case that it's going to happen this year for us."

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

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Editor's note: This article was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: With this fresh batch of economic data out today, what does it all mean for the Fed's outlook moving forward? For more, let's bring in Ross Mayfield, Baird Investment Strategy Analyst. Ross, it's good to see you. So, yes, you had CPI earlier in the week hot. Then you had retail sales today. How do you put it all together?

ROSS MAYFIELD: Well, the market, as you mentioned, has mostly shrugged off the hotter-than-expected CPI print. A lot of that is driven by housing and our view and I think probably investors' view is you kind of shrug at housing, what are you supposed to do in the near term? Is the Fed going to really shift back to hawkish and rate hikes over just housing?

As far as retail sales, I mean, it's a noisy data print. It's just one month after the consumer has really been such a workhorse for two-plus years at this point. So you don't want to write it off completely, but I do think there's potential for some seasonal issues and some weather-related stuff.

At the same time, the market is going to take any feather in the cap that will make the Fed ease back a little bit and pivot more towards that dovish point of view. So overall, economic data has been good. Every other release this morning on the manufacturing side, on the housing side was above consensus. The Citi economic surprise index is still on the rise and has been for months. So I think overall, the economy looks pretty good. And if retail sales give the Fed just a little bit of pause, and that's probably a good thing for investors as well.