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Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets
The following is a summary of my post-CPI tweets. You can follow me @inflation_guy (or follow the tweets on the main page at http://mikeashton.wordpress.com)
- Core CPI +0.14%, close to rounding to +0.2%. An 0.2% would have caused a panic in TIPS, where there have been far more sellers recently.
- y/y core to 1.73%, again almost rounding to 1.8% versus 1.7% expected. This just barely qualifies as being “as expected”, in other words.
- Core services fell to 2.4%, but core goods rose to -0.3% y/y.
- OER re-accelerated to 2.71% from 2.68% y/y. It will go higher.
- really interesting that core goods did not weaken MORE given dollar strength. $ strength is overplayed by inflation bears.
- Apparel went to 0.5% y/y from 0.0%. That’s the category probably most sensitive directly to dollar movements b/c apparel is all overseas.
- Accel major groups: Food/Bev, Apparel, Recreation (24.1% of basket). Decel: Housing, Transp, Med Care, Educ/Comm (72.5%).
- Though note that in housing, Primary rents rose from 3.18% to 3.29%, and OER from 2.68% to 2.71%, so weakness is mostly household energy.
- That’s a new high for primary rental inflation. Lodging away from home also went to new high, 5.04% y/y. But it’s choppier.
- Airfares continued to decelerate, -3.01% from -2.71%. Ebola scares can’t have helped that category, which most expected to rebound.
- But these days, airfares are very highly correlated to fuel prices (wasn’t always the case). [ed note: see chart below]
- In Medical Care, pharmaceuticals rose to 3.08% from 2.72%. But the medical services pieces decelerated.
- Decel in med services is the surprise these days as the passage of the sequester cause positive base effects.
- The weakness in med services holds down core PCE, too. Median CPI continues to be a better measure as a result.
- College tuition and fees 3.36% from 3.32%. Still low compared to where it’s been. Strong markets help colleges hold down tuitions.
- Core CPI ex-housing partly as a result of continued medical care weakness is down to a new low 0.877% from 0.911%.
- That continues to be the horse race: housing versus a wide variety of other things not inflating. Yet.
We may hear about how this CPI report shows that there is “still no inflation,” but the simple fact is that the report was a little stronger-than-expected, that shelter inflation continues to accelerate with no end in sight, and that there was no large effect seen in core inflation from the strength of the dollar. The dollar has an evident effect on energy commodities, and a lesser effect on other commodities, but once you get to finished goods it takes a larger FX move or one longer in duration than the modest dollar rally we have had so far to cause meaningful movements in inflation.
The dollar’s strength, reflecting in energy weakness, also shows up in some categories where we don’t fully appreciate the link to energy. The airfares connection is always one of my favorites to show. Prior to 2004, there was basically no correlation between airfares and jet fuel prices (vertical part of the chart below). After 2004, the correlation went to basically 1.0 (see chart, source Enduring Investments).
The real conundrum in the CPI right now is the medical care piece. We always knew there would be difficulties in extracting what is really going on in medical care once Obamacare kicked in, because many of the costs of that program don’t show up immediately as consumer costs. But the main effect in the data all last year was the effect of the sequester on Medicare payments, which pushed down Medical Care inflation from over 4% in mid-2012 to 2% in 2013. But as the sequester passed out of the data, Medical Care CPI rose to nearly 3% earlier this year…and then slipped, abruptly, back to the lows (see chart, source Bloomberg).
Is it possible that Obamacare is really restraining consumer inflation for medical care? Sure, it is possible. But there is far too much noise at this point to know what is happening in that component. And it really matters, because the overweighting of medical care and underweighting of housing in core PCE is the main reason that the Fed-favored price index shows 1.5% while median CPI is at 2.2%, within a snick of the highs since the crisis (see chart, source Bloomberg – note median CPI isn’t out yet for September).
From a markets perspective, the TIPS market (and the commodities market, for that matter) have been pricing in a pernicious disinflation and/or deflationary pressure. It is simply not there. And so, even with a print that couldn’t reach 0.2% on core, and even heading into a big auction tomorrow, inflation breakevens are rallying nicely, up 3.5-4.5bps across the board. Imagine what they would have done with a print that was a bona fide strong print!
Seasonal Allergies
Come get your commodities and inflation swaps here! Big discount on inflation protection! Come get them while you can! These deals won’t last long!
Like the guy hawking hangover cures at a frat party, sometimes I feel like I am in the right place, but just a bit early. That entrepreneur knows that hangover cures are often needed after a party, and the people at the party also know that they’ll need hangover cures on the morrow, but sales of hangover cures are just not popular at frat parties.
The ‘disinflation party’ is in full swing, and it is being expressed in all the normal ways: beat-down of energy commodities, which today collectively lost 3.2% as front WTI Crude futures dropped to a 2-year low (see chart, source Bloomberg),
…10-year breakevens dropped to a 3-year low (see chart, source Bloomberg),
…and 1-year inflation swaps made their more-or-less annual foray into sub-1% territory.
So it helps to remember that none of the recent thrashing is particularly new or different.
What is remarkable is that this sort of thing happens just about every year, with fair regularity. Take a look at the chart of 10-year breakevens again. See the spike down in late 2010, late 2011, and roughly mid-2013. It might help to compare it to the chart of front Crude, which has a similar pattern. What happens is that oil prices follow a regular seasonal pattern, and as a result inflation expectations follow the same pattern. What is incredible is that this pattern happens with 10-year breakevens, even though the effect of spot oil prices on 10-year inflation expectations ought to be approximately nil.
What I can tell you is that in 12 of the last 15 years, 10-year TIPS yields have fallen in the 30 days after October 15th, and in 11 of the past 15 years, 10-year breakevens were higher in the subsequent 30 days.
Now, a lot of that is simply a carry dynamic. If you own TIPS right now, inflation accretion is poor because of the low prints that are normal for this time of year. Over time, as new buyers have to endure less of that poor carry, TIPS prices rise naturally. But what happens in heading into the poor-carry period is that lots of investors dump TIPS because of the impending poor inflation accretion. And the poor accretion is due largely to the seasonal movement in energy prices. The following chart (source: Enduring Investments) shows the BLS assumed seasonality in correcting the CPI tendencies, and the actual realized seasonal pattern over the last decade. The tendency is pronounced, and it leads directly to the seasonality in real yields and breakevens.
This year, as you can tell from some of the charts, the disinflation party is rocking harder than it has for a few years. Part of this is the weakening of inflation dynamics in Europe, part is the fear that some investors have that the end of QE will instantly collapse money supply growth and lead to deflation, and part of it this year is the weird (and frustrating) tendency for breakevens to have a high correlation with stocks when equities decline but a low correlation when they rally.
But in any event, it is a good time to stock up on the “cure” you know you will need later. According to our proprietary measure, 10-year real yields are about 47bps too high relative to nominal yields (and we feel that you express this trade through breakevens rather than outright TIPS ownership, although actual trade construction can be more nuanced). They haven’t been significantly more mispriced than that since the crisis, and besides the 2008 example they haven’t been cheaper since the early days (pre-2003) when TIPS were not yet widely owned in institutional portfolios. Absent a catastrophe, they will not get much cheaper. (Importantly, our valuation metric has generally “beaten the forwards” in that the snap-back when it happens is much faster than the carry dynamic fades).
So don’t get all excited about “declining inflation expectations.” There is not much going on here that is at all unusual for this time of year.
What Risk-Parity Paring Could Mean for Equities
The stock market, the bond market, the commodities markets (to a lesser extent), FX markets – they are all experiencing a marked increase in volatility.
Some observers want to call this bearish for equities, mainly because they already are bearish. This is a very bad reason. While really bad equity returns almost always occur coincident with a rise in volatility – the old maxim is that stocks go ‘up on the staircase and down on the escalator’ – that does not mean that volatility causes bad returns. Or, put another way, there are also periods of increased volatility that do not precede and are not coincident with bad returns.
However, there actually is a reason that increased volatility might lead to poor short- to medium-term returns, that isn’t based on technical analysis or spurious correlations. Moreover, a relatively new phenomenon (the rise of so-called ‘risk-parity’ strategies) is starting to institutionalize what was already a somewhat natural response to volatility.
In ‘risk-parity’ strategies, the weight of an asset class (or a security within an asset class, sometimes) is inversely proportional to the risk it adds to the portfolio. Generally speaking, “risk” here is defined as variance, because it is easy to estimate and there are markets where symmetrical variance trades – i.e., options markets. But what this means is that when volatility (sometimes realized volatility, and sometimes option “implied” volatility) rises in stocks, then risk parity strategies tend to be shedding equities because they look riskier, and vice-versa. Right now, risk parity strategies are likely to be overweight equities because of the long period of low realized and implied volatility (even though the valuation measures imply quite high risk in the sense most of us mean it, in terms of the probability of return shortfall). Risk parity strategies are probably superior to ‘return-chasing’ methodologies, but by being ‘risk-chasing’ they end up doing something fairly similar when they are all operating together.
Note that while risk-parity strategies are comparatively new – well, not exactly because it is an oldish idea, but they have only recently become a big fad – this general phenomenon is not. The natural response to greater equity market volatility is to pare back exposure; when your broker statement starts to swing around wildly it makes you nervous and so you may start to take some profits. This is also true of other asset classes but it seems to me to be especially true in equities. Nobody who gets involved in commodities is surprised at volatility: the asset class suffers from a midguided belief that it is terribly volatile even though commodity indices are just about exactly as volatile as equity indices over time. But equity investors, contrariwise, seem perennially surprised at 2% moves.
So, while the recent volatility doesn’t mean that a move lower in equities is assured, it increases the probability of such because risk-parity strategies (and other investors reacting nervously to overweights in their equity exposure) will begin to scale back positions in the asset class in favor of positions in other asset classes, probably mostly bonds and commodities. At this point it would be good for me to point out that only the very short-term volatility measures have moved up dramatically; the VIX is well off its bottom but only up to 18.8 and it has been there numerous times in the last few years (see chart, source Bloomberg). But the longer the volatility continues like we have seen it for the last week or two, the bigger the chances that the asset-allocation boxes start to make important shifts (and the quant hedge fund boxes will probably move a bit before those asset allocation boxes do).
As an aside, the tendency for asset allocation shifts to follow volatility shifts is not the reason that the VIX displays a strong inverse directionality. Neither is the main reason for this inverse directionality because the VIX is a “fear gauge.” The main reason is that the VIX weights near-the-money options more heavily than out-of-the-money options. Because options skews almost always imply more downside volatility for stocks than upside volatility[1], when the market declines it tends to bring more “high volatility” strikes into play and so part of the VIX increase in a down market is simply mechanical.
I am not calling for a sharp decline in stocks, nor for an extended decline in stocks. My position and view is as it has long been, that the prospect for attractive real returns from equities over the next 5-10 years is quite small and beaten handily by commodities’ prospective returns at that end of the risk spectrum. I don’t think that most investors (me included!) should swing asset allocations around frequently in response to technical indicators or such things as “momentum”, but rather should focus on evaluating expected long-term returns (which are somewhat predictable) and invest for value. And I must admit I also think that “risk-parity” is a clever marketing gimmick but a pretty absurd way to assemble a portfolio for almost everyone. My point here is to highlight one little-considered aspect of herd behavior, and how that herd behavior may have become more institutionalized as late, and to consider the risks that herd behavior may create.
[1] This in turn is not due so much from the tendency of markets to have more downside volatility than upside volatility, but from the fact that buying protective puts and selling “covered” calls are both considered “conservative” options strategies. So, out-of-the-money puts tend to be too expensive and out-of-the-money calls too rich.
