Waiting for prices to settle and things to go back to how they were? Don't hold your breath, Mohamed El-Erian, president of Queens' College, Cambridge; chief economic adviser at Allianz SE; chair of Gramercy Fund Management; and former chief executive officer of Pimco, effectively suggested on CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday.

"Most of the report … was distorted in a really important manner by the strikes, by the hurricanes," El-Erian said of the jobs report that came out last Friday. "We have an economy that has been growing robustly, inflation is coming down, and the main challenge for the next administration is not just to maintain what is called 'economic exceptionalism,' because we're outperforming all other advanced economies, but also to continue to reposition it for the engines of tomorrow's prosperity, and that's absolutely critical."

Straight ahead so far, but El-Erian has demonstrated economic caution over time. Face the Nation's Margaret Brennan, noting that the Federal Reserve could potentially cut rates again on Thursday during the Federal Open Market Committee meeting as inflation has continued to flow, asked about prices.