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Transcript: “What the Money Velocity Comeback Means for Inflation, and Investors”
Episode #50 of the Inflation Guy Podcast was well-received. In particular, my analogy of the car-trailer-spring system to explain why velocity is doing what it is doing garnered some strong positive feedback. Several people suggested that I publish a transcript, for those people who would prefer to read it (or who don’t know I do a podcast). What follows is a somewhat-edited version of the podcast. I took out a lot of “um” and repeat words, and the usual sorts of things that you’re embarrassed to see when you read a transcript of what you said. I tightened it up a little bit in some places and added a clarifying word here and there in brackets. But for the most part, it’s true to the original.
If you have any questions, ping me. And subscribe to the podcast, follow me on Twitter @inflation_guy (or subscribe to the private Twitter feed), or hmu to talk about how we manage money at Enduring Investments for individuals and small institutions.
Hello and welcome to Cents and Sensibility, the Inflation Guy Podcast.
I am Michael Ashton, I’m the Inflation Guy, and I’m your host. And today we have Episode 50 of The Inflation Guy Podcast and I’m going to return to money velocity because we had data out today for the fourth quarter of 2022 and there was a significant move higher in money velocity. I’ll get to that in a bit and talk about the implications that we should take away – the practical implications for what this means.
But I want to talk about this because it’s sort of become de rigueur among certain bond bulls to point at the massive drop that we had in money velocity that coincided with the massive increase in M2 during the COVID-crisis response. And those bond bulls say that velocity is permanently impaired and so the velocity plunged and it’s never gonna come back. And so it successfully blunted the importance of the massive rise in money. But we don’t have to worry about about that ever coming back. We don’t have to worry about it from now on.
This is obviously crucial to the case for lower inflation because that case basically boils down to: money growth has rapidly decelerated – it’s been negative over the last…I think it’s negative over the last 12 months now. But for a while it’s been flat to negative and so “therefore inflation will fall.”
That’s only true, though, if the sharp fall that we had in velocity is not reflected in now having a sharp rise in velocity at the same time that the sharp rise in money is being mirrored by insufficient money growth or money supply decline.
So if money…that spike now comes back and velocity plunged but doesn’t come back, then that’s the case for why we had some inflation, but not as much as the money supply spike would suggest, and now we’re going to have disinflation (or some people even say deflation – hard to believe that though).
To believe that money velocity plunged and then isn’t gonna come back, you have to believe that velocity declined for a permanent reason. But it didn’t, and that’s the bottom line here: that’s not how velocity works.
[This podcast] Episode 10 was about money velocity…and Episode 30. [Periodically in] this podcast [I have] also talked about how money velocity had turned higher last summer; at the time it was just sort of a the beginning of a turn higher. But in this quarter, the quarter just completed – the fourth quarter of 2022 – the velocity of M2 rose at an 11.4% annualized rate (which means it went up 7.3% for the whole year).
That happened, naturally, because we had money supply down while we had fourth quarter growth – real growth “Q” – that was positive, and obviously an increase in prices as well. So your PQ side of things was quite positive for the fourth quarter and M declined. And since velocity is essentially a plug number, it means velocity had to go up a lot to balance the left side of that equation, the MV=PQ equation.
Essentially, what’s really happening with velocity and the reason that velocity sort of had to come back – obviously it’s a plug number, but here’s the bottom line story of why velocity plunged. It wasn’t any permanent impairment. You should think about it this way:
You have a rapid-moving variable in in the money supply which spiked all of a sudden and you have a slower-moving variable, which is prices (because it takes time for people to change prices and for that price change to be picked up in the survey measures at the BLS and so on). And so that’s sort of like you have an automobile attached to a trailer, but instead of having a sort of a fixed rig that is attached to the trailer, you have a spring. So as the car moves away…the car goes into gear and starts to pull away. It’s moving faster than the trailer and so the spring stretches and eventually the trailer starts to move and eventually comes along. And as long as the car doesn’t continue to accelerate forever, eventually that spring will compress again and the trailer will catch up.
In fact, actually that analogy is so apt in this case, I wonder if you can’t model the whole situation with a k constant, like you would with spring physics. Because the analogy is very good. Essentially what’s happening is that, you know, money supply went zooming away and prices came along, but they came along more slowly. And so now the car is sort of sort of decelerating and the trailer (prices) is catching up to the spring, which is money velocity is starting to go back the other direction.
It’s best to think about this…and I mentioned this in the other times that I’ve talked about velocity…it’s best to think about this as being caused by (if you have to think about in terms of a cause: obviously it’s mainly a quantitative thing that sort of has to happen because we have two variables that are moving in two different paces)…it’s best to sort of think about that as being caused by precautionary demand for cash. Which is kind of what happened, right?
So, during the crisis, the government dumped tons and tons of cash into everybody’s accounts and it wasn’t spent immediately. It took some time to spend it.
So why wasn’t it spent immediately? Well, part of it was people had to figure out what to spend it on, but part of it was it was a scary time and so people figured, “well, maybe I’ll hang on to this a little while or maybe I’ll use it to pay off some debts or whatever.” It took a while for it to actually be spent until people’s financial situation got stressed enough that they had to go dip into the money that they swore they were gonna save…or what have you.
That’s the way I have modeled this is as a precautionary demand or a demand [for liquid cash] based on fear and concern about things. But the real reason is that this happened so fast, the money was flushed so fast into the system that there just was no way that prices could really respond that quickly.
Now the bottom line here is that velocity is not permanently impaired. In fact, it should rise with interest rates, as interest rates go up. And that is in fact kind of what’s happening…although I think most of what we’re seeing is this decline in the precautionary demand, but some of it is that with higher interest rates, there are more opportunities to do something other than hold cash earning zero. There’s some opportunities to take that away from true cash balances and checking balances and stuff and put it into term deposits and stuff like that.
And that means that velocity is going to come back (and it is), and that means that prices will eventually have to catch up with the car, right? The trailer eventually has to catch up with the car.
Money supply has risen since the beginning of this crisis, something around 40%, which means that prices are going to have to go up something in that neighborhood.
Actually, if velocity was unchanged over the entire length of this period and money supply only went up 40%…if you want to know how much prices are gonna go up, you have to divide the increase in money supply (that’s 40%) by the increase in GDP, whatever that turns out to be. So if GDP is up 10% then we need to see prices up an aggregate of 30%-ish or so. And so that’s sort of where I think we’re eventually going to go.
So what’s the takeaway? What does that mean, and what should you do about it?
The important takeaway is that while we are past peak inflation for now, there’s no sign that we’re going to crash back to 2% anytime soon. If in fact money velocity had not initially plunged – if velocity had been flat through this whole period – then I would be looking at the [recent] decline in the money supply growth going down to zero, and even negative, and I would say, “look, inflation should be coming down hard here; it should be going negative.” The problem is that we still haven’t had the rise in prices that you would have expected from the initial rise in money. Where that shows up is [in] that velocity plunge and [it] hasn’t come all the way back over the long haul.
The level of prices, as I said, is closely related to the level of M2 over GDP. And that’s just a consequence of the algebra of MV=PQ. So since 1990 that…well, let’s just go back further.
If you go from like 1959 to 1991, about 32 years, that relationship was super tight. M2 over that time period roughly tripled: it was up 286%. Sorry, roughly quadrupled. I’m sorry: M two divided by GDP was up 286% And the GDP deflator was up 303%. So they both roughly quadrupled over that time frame. Since 1990, that tight relationship has been less tight, which has shown up as a lot of velocity volatility.
Now, this is not irrelevant, volatility. Some of it is because there’s a changing definition of money; M2 and M1 have kind of become blurred over time. Some of that volatility is an error in measuring nominal GDP. Some of it, and maybe most of it, is excessive Fed activism on interest rate management…you know, pushing interest rates for example artificially too low since the Global Financial Crisis, which artificially depressed money velocity and so on.
But the basic relationship over a long period of time is still there. There are people out there who sort of adjust money supply in certain ways to get a better fit and I’m just I’m just not super comfortable that I know exactly the right way to do that.
I’m looking at the big picture here and I know if M2 divided by GDP goes up a lot, then we should have prices go up a lot.
Anyway, the bottom line is that inflation is not going to crash back down. We still have a lot of potential energy in the system that is pushing prices higher. And that means that market expectations of inflation are too low right now. The inflation swaps market is pricing that by June we’ll have year-on-year inflation back to 2.16%, which would just be an amazing crash back down without gasoline plunging back down. That would be truly, truly amazing. And 10 year inflation expectations, as measured by breakevens (the difference between 10 year nominal treasuries and 10 year TIPS, the difference in those yields), is 2.3% right now. That’s just crazy. Tthose expectations are just too low unless velocity’s permanently impaired.
And what that means practically for you, the investor, is that if anything you should be overweight (still) inflation hedges even though inflation is coming down from its recent peak. At the very least you should be no worse than flat – you shouldn’t be short inflation here.
You probably should be in inflation-linked bonds still rather than nominal bonds. [There are] a couple of different reasons for that, but one of them is that right now inflation-linked bonds, or [rather] the nominal bond market, is pricing inflation way too cheaply. Inflation-linked bonds will give you actual inflation and it’s likely to be higher than what’s being priced in the nominal bond market.
Real estate, commodities…all these things which are classic inflation hedges are probably still good here,even though inflation is coming down. In general, equities are not good in that kind of circumstance, but if you’re going to be in equities – and everyone tends to hold some equities – you should look for firms with pricing power. What does that mean? Hell if I know what “firms with pricing power” means exactly. Everyone thinks they have pricing power until they don’t, and they think they don’t have it until they try it and discover that they do, right?
Right now, all kinds of firms do have power to raise prices and many of them are raising prices. So it’s hard to tell which ones are the ones that will be able to keep raising prices to keep up with the input cost pressure (largely wages) that they’re going to continue to have here going forward.
Which companies have the ability to sort of stay ahead of that? I’d say in general, you’re gonna look at firms that have a lower labor content, because commodity prices have come down…or they’re going up less fast, I guess. But labor rates continue to rise rapidly and probably will for some time.
I think firms with domestic supply chains are probably better off, or at least North American supply chains, are probably better off than the ones with long international supply chains.
I think that maybe something like apartment REITS could be interesting, especially because everybody was so convinced that that real estate was going to collapse – and it’s clearly not collapsing. Rents is something that tends to keep up with wages over time. Maybe rents have gotten a little bit ahead of themselves, but I think that the decline or the deceleration in rents is probably already kind of priced into those markets.
As always, by the way, podcast musings should not be construed as recommendations.
You know, I try to avoid mentioning specific tickers all the time because I’m an advisor and that gets sticky because if you recommend, say, Tesla, [then] you have to then give all the reasons why Tesla might go down and, you know, there’s all kinds of rules about that. So I try to not spend a lot of time recommending specific securities. But you know, you can always become a client! And we can talk all about it. Or you can send me email at inflationguy@enduringinvestments.com and we can have some conversations about that, but the bottom line is that you shouldn’t be letting your guard down.
Money velocity has been coming back for a while; it’s starting to come back more seriously. Even though money supply is declining, or flat to declining, it does not mean that inflation is going to plunge back to 2% because we have this potential energy that’s still working its way through the system. There’s no sign that velocity is permanently impaired.
So, don’t let your guard down. Defend Your Money! …and if inflation is coming for you, remember: you know a guy.
The Quintillion-Dollar Coin
I was going to write a technical column today about how the sensitivity of bonds (and consequently, lots of other asset prices) to interest rates increases as interest rates decline, and discuss the implications for equity investors nowadays as interest rates head back up. That article will have to wait another week. Today, I want to just quickly dispense with a really silly idea that keeps making the rounds every time there is a standoff on the debt ceiling, pushed by the same guys who think Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) will work (even though we just tried it, and it didn’t).
The idea is that, thanks to a law passed back in the 1990s, the Treasury has the right to issue a platinum coin of any denomination. Ergo, it could produce a $1 Trillion coin, deposit it at the Federal Reserve (who does not have the option to not accept legal tender, Secretary Janet Yellen’s recently-voiced concerns notwithstanding), and continue to pay the government’s bills. Why? One well-traveled and entertaining simpleton started explaining the reasoning for doing this by saying “there’s this silly, anachronistic and ineffectual law on the books called the Debt Ceiling…”
If we started doing really really silly, not to mention stupid, things to get around every law that we thought was silly and anachronistic, legislators would be busy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. (And, obviously, the law isn’t “ineffectual”; if it was then we wouldn’t need to get around it.)
I am continually amazed by how durable the really stupid ideas are. For instance, the notion that the government is lying about inflation to the tune of 6% per year is an idea that never seems to die even though you can show with basic math that it can’t possibly be the case. So, let’s dispense with this one even though I am sure I will have to keep slaying this dragon when it inevitably comes back from the dead.
A useful tool of logic that’s handy when you are trying to smoke out a dumb idea is to ask, “If that works, why don’t we do lots more of it?” Let’s not try to figure out why a $1 Trillion coin is a bad idea. Let’s try to figure out why a $1 Quintillion coin (a million trillions) is a bad idea.
After all, if we are going to mint a coin anyway, it doesn’t cost much more to stamp “Quinti” than it does to stamp “Tri”. And if the Treasury minted a Quintillion-dollar coin and deposited it at the Fed, it would be much more significant. With that balance, the Treasury could pay off all outstanding debt, fully fund Medicare and Social Security, and cancel all taxes basically forever while also dramatically increasing services! Why isn’t that a better idea? I spit on your Trillion-dollar coin.
Naturally, that would be a terrible idea and it’s now obvious why. I can think of several reasons, but I’ll leave most of them for other people to highlight in the comments. The immediate one is that by paying off all federal debt, increasing spending and decreasing taxes to zero, the money supply would increase immensely and immediately. As we saw quite recently, the result that rapidly follows is much higher inflation. Much much higher inflation. I will see your 8% and raise you 800%. Yes, to some extent that would depend on the Congress deciding to do that spending and cut those taxes – but do you doubt that would happen? And the Treasury offering to buy back all of the outstanding bonds wouldn’t need Congressional authorization. That’s trillions in money being suddenly returned to bondholders, which puts it back in circulation.
A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’d be talking real money.
The Monetary Policy Revolution in Three Charts
Over the last few years, I’ve pointed out exhaustively how the current operating approach at the Fed towards monetary policy is distinctly different from past tightening cycles. In fact, it is basically a humongous experiment, and if the Fed succeeds in bringing inflation gently back down to target it will be either a monumental accomplishment or, more likely, monumentally lucky. My goal in this blog post is to explain the difference, and illustrate the challenge, in just a few straightforward charts. There are doubtless other people who have a far more complex way of illustrating this, but these charts capture the essence of the dynamic.
Let me start first with the basic ‘free market’ interest rate chart. Here, I am showing the quantity of bank lending on the x-axis, and the ‘price’ of the loan – the interest rate – on the y-axis. If we assume for the moment that inflation is stable (don’t worry, the fact that it isn’t will come into play later) then whether the y-axis is in nominal or real terms is irrelevant. So we have a basic supply and demand chart. Demand for loans slopes downward: as the interest rate declines, borrowers want to borrow more. The supply curve slopes upward: banks want to lend more money as the interest rate increases.
An important realization here is that the supply curve at some point turns vertical. There is some quantity of loans, more than which banks cannot lend. There are two main limits on the quantity of bank lending: the quantity of reserves, since a bank needs to hold reserves against its lending, and the amount of capital. These are both particular to a bank and to the banking sector as a whole, especially reserves because they are easily traded. Anyway, once aggregate lending is high enough that there are no more reserves available for a bank to acquire to support the lending, then the bank (and banks in aggregate) cannot lend any more at any interest rate – at least, in principle, and ignoring the non-bank lenders / loan sharks. We’re talking about the Fed’s actions here and the Fed does not directly control the leverage available to loan sharks.
Now, traditionally when the Fed tightened policy, it did so by reducing the aggregate quantity of reserves in the system. This had the effect of making the supply curve go vertical further to the left than it had. In this chart, the tightening shows as a movement from S to S’. Note that the equilibrium point involves fewer total loans (we moved left on the x axis), which is the intent of the policy: reduce the supply of money (or, in the dynamic case, its growth) by restraining reserves. Purely as a byproduct, and not very important at that, the interest rate rises. How much it rises depends on the shape of the demand curve – how elastic demand for loans is.
As an aside, we are assuming here that the secondary constraint – bank capital – is not binding. That is, if reserves were plentiful, the S curve would go vertical much farther to the right. In the Global Financial Crisis, that is part of what happened and was the reason that vastly increase reserves did not lead to massive inflation, nor to a powerful recovery: banks were capital-constrained, so that the Fed’s addition of more reserves did not help. Banks were lending all that they could, given their capital.
Manipulating the aggregate quantity of reserves was the way the Fed used to conduct monetary policy. No longer. Now, the Fed merely moves interest rates. Let’s see what effect that would have. Let’s assume for now that the interest rate is a hard floor, and that banks cannot lend at less than the floor rate. This isn’t true, but for ease of illustration. If the Fed institutes a higher floor on interest rates then what happens to the quantity of loans?
This looks like we have achieved the same result, more simply! We merely define the quantity of loans we want, pick the interest rate that will generate the demand for those loans, and voila, we can add as many reserves as we want and still get the loan production we need. The arrows in this third chart show the same movements as the arrows in the prior chart. The quantity of loans is really determined entirely by the demand curve – at the prescribed interest rate, there is a demand for “X” loans, and since banks are not reserve-constrained they are able to supply those loans.
However, it’s really important to notice a few things. The prior statement is true if and only if we know what the demand curve looks like, and if the floor is enforced. Then, a given interest rate maps perfectly into Q. But:
- D is not known with precision. And it moves. What is more, it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with interest rates: for example, general expectations about business opportunities or the availability of work.
- Moreover, D is really mapped against real rates, while the Fed is setting nominal rates. So, for a given level of a nominal floor, in real space it bucks up and down based on the expected inflation rate.
- Also, the floor is not a hard floor. At any given interest rate where the floor would be binding, the desire of banks to lend (the location of the S curve) exceeds the demand for loans (by the amount of the ?? segment in the chart above). The short-term interest rate still affects the cost to banks of that lending, but we would still expect competition among lenders. This should manifest in more aggressive lending practices – tighter credit spreads, for example, or non-rate competition such as looser documentary requirements.
In the second chart I showed, the Fed directly controlled the quantity of reserves and therefore loans. So these little problems didn’t manifest.
Now, there is one advantage to setting interest rates rather than setting the available quantity of reserves as a way of reducing lending activity. Only the banking sector is reserve-constrained. If there is an adequate non-bank lending network, then the setting of interest rates to control the demand for loans will affect the non-bank lenders as well while reserve constraint would not. So this is somewhat “fairer” for banks. But this only means that non-bank lenders will also be competing to fill the reduced demand for loans, and the non-bank lending sector is less-vigorously regulated than the banking sector. More-aggressive lending practices from unregulated lenders is not, it seems to me, something we should be encouraging but what do I know? The banks aren’t lobbying me to help level the playing field against the unregulated.
Hopefully this helps illuminate what I have been saying. I think the final chart above would be a lovely final exam question for an economics class, but a bad way to run a central bank. Reality is not so easily charted.
Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets (December 2022)
Below is a summary of my post-CPI tweets. You can (and should!) follow me @inflation_guy, but to get these tweets in real time on CPI morning you need to subscribe to @InflGuyPlus by going to the shop at https://inflationguy.blog/shop/ , where you can also subscribe to the Enduring Investments Quarterly Inflation Outlook. Sign up for email updates to my occasional articles here. Individual and institutional investors, issuers and risk managers with interests in this area be sure to stop by Enduring Investments! Check out the Inflation Guy podcast!
- It’s #CPI Day – and this one finishes up the book for 2022.
- I am doing the walk-up differently today. I’m doing it as a thread on the night before, which I’ll re-tweet in the morning. I’m usually doing the analysis in the evening…why wait?
- Today’s number, or I guess really we can say starting with October or November, starts the interesting part of the inflation cycle.
- When inflation was going up, excuses abounded but the real debate was WHEN the peak was going to be, and HOW HIGH only to a lesser extent. Now that inflation appears to be clearly decelerating, the much more important debate is: where is it decelerating to?
- If inflation drops back to 2%, and becomes inert at that level again, then the Fed will deserve considerable laurels. If inflation instead drops to 4% and appears resistant to a drop below that, then a much more interesting debate will ensue.
- I think it should be clear that I am in the latter camp.
- The other interesting thing that we’re going to see, and are already seeing, is manifestation of the basic tricks of the trade of macro economists.
- Trick 1 is to assume that everything returns to the mean. Most things do, eventually, return to the mean – so if you are wrong on the timing, you’ll probably eventually be right. Economists love to forecast returns to the mean.
- Economists though are very bad at forecasting departures AWAY from the mean, which is why there were so many forecasts of “transitory” this cycle.
- Since they didn’t see it coming, it must have been a random perturbation (because that’s how their models work). But it’ll all go back to the mean and all is right with the world. Or so goes the assumption.
- Trick 2 is to assume that the mean doesn’t change, or changes pretty slowly. In econometrics terms, the distribution is ‘stationary.’ If you’re going to forecasts returns to the mean, it is fairly important that the ‘mean’ is known or knowable and doesn’t move a lot.
- The problem in inflation is that the (unobservable) mean of the distribution never appeared to be very stable until the mid-1990s; the hypothesis is that this anchoring happened because of “anchored inflation expectations.”
- (A member of the Fed’s own research staff tore apart that notion in a devastating article a couple of years ago, but the Fed promptly ignored him because if he was right it’s really bad for forecasting the way that they like to forecast: everything returns to the mean.)
- Getting to Thursday’s CPI figure, we can see these tricks in play in the economist forecasts.
- As an example, one of the forecasts I saw from a large bank had drags calculated from Used Cars (and New Cars), a deceleration in shelter costs, a drag from airfares due to lower jet fuel costs, and a drag from health insurance. But what about accelerations?
- Do you really think that NOTHING will accelerate, or are all of those pre-defined as “one-offs”?
- It reminds me a little of what Rob Arnott says about the S&P earnings “ex-items”: any one company it might make sense to ex- the unusual events. But in aggregate, some level of unusual events is usual. So it is with inflation.
- There will be some ups. So my forecasts are a little higher than others’, because I anticipate there will be some surprises.
- Where would those surprises come from? Wage growth is strong, and that pushes up on prices in hospitality, domestic manufacturing, food away from home, and even shelter.
- I also don’t think that airfares will be the drag that’s implied by jet fuel. Here’s the regression that would make you think they WOULD.
- But here’s the one that makes you think maybe not. Airlines tend to push prices higher when there are spikes in jet fuel costs, but they don’t necessarily lower them very fast when jet fuel prices decline. And did I mention wage pressures? Airlines feel them.
- I do think that used car prices will drag again, although the CPI has been falling a little faster than the Black Book and Mannheim indices would suggest they should. But I don’t see a strong argument for New Car prices to decline.
- New Cars are in black in this chart, while Used are in blue. New car prices are up 20%, while used are up 40%, since the end of 2019. And the money supply is up around 40%. That doesn’t mean new car prices won’t decline, but it doesn’t look like a slam dunk to me.
- Finally, a point I’ve been making recently on a longer-term horizon viewpoint. Markets are fully priced for inflation to totally and almost immediately mean-revert. Large declines in breakevens, especially short BEI. Some of that is the gasoline slide. Not all of it.
- The short end of the inflation swap curve has NSA inflation at -0.38% m/m in December, +0.37% in Jan, +0.33% in Feb, and 0.30% in March. And that’s the last 0.3% print we see. According to inflation swaps, y/y inflation will be at 2% in June.
- Even if I am wrong about inflation staying around 4-5%, you have a 2% cushion to bet that way. (I think I used an unfortunate analogy a few days ago saying that if you give me 21 points I’ll take TCU over Georgia, but you get my point.)
- Ergo, for choice I’d be long breakevens going into this number.
- The response in the stock market will be interesting. If the number is as-expected or better, I would think stocks will try and scream higher on the theory that the Fed can back off. The problem is that folks are already long for that, I sense.
- So I’d probably sell that pop, especially because earnings may be a hurdle in the near future, though you have to be cognizant of the 200-day moving average in the S&P. The mo-mo crowd will try to get some prints above that so I’d be cautious.
- What about on a strong CPI? Few seem to be thinking/talking of that, which means to me that folks are a little naked there. Do I think it would change the Fed trajectory? Not from what the Fed is SAYING they’re doing, but from what the market is pricing – yes.
- As I said, this is the interesting part of the inflation cycle. Buckle up.
- At 8:30ET, I’ll be pulling the data in & will post charts and #s – then retweet some of those charts w/ comments plus other charts. Around 9:30ish, I will have a private conference call for subscribers where I’ll quickly summarize the numbers.
- Pre-release, both stocks and bonds are loving this number! May be that some are reading into the fact Biden has a speech this morn including inflation as a topic, and perhaps he wouldn’t if the number was bad. But even if it is, he can focus on y/y so not sure that means much…
- That’s all for now. Good luck!
- m/m CPI: -0.0794% m/m Core CPI: 0.303%
- Last 12 core CPI figures
- Overall, highest core number in 3 months, but clearly in a down trend. I think lots of people would be DELIGHTED with 3.6% annualized compared with where we have been, but that’s closer to what I am expecting than what the market/Fed is looking for.
- M/M, Y/Y, and prior Y/Y for 8 major subgroups
- Interesting thing is apparel, up for the second month in a row. Apparel is an almost pure import, so if it’s up then either (a) the recent dollar weakness is already affecting prices or more likely (b) there is pricing power at retail, and the markdowns for Christmas were lower.
- Core Goods: 2.15% y/y Core Services: 7.05% y/y
- The story continues to be bifurcated and we will look further at the four-pieces. More important than the fact that services are trending and goods are deflating, is whether the services part was all rents.
- Here is my early and automated guess at Median CPI for this month: 0.378%
- Clearly good news! Lowest median m/m in quite some time. So core was higher, but median lower. THIS is positive. And as I said, this is the interesting part now: inflation is decelerating, but why and how fast and how far? Median clearly shows it is.
- Primary Rents: 8.35% y/y OER: 7.53% y/y
- Further: Primary Rents 0.79% M/M, 8.35% Y/Y (7.91% last) OER 0.78% M/M, 7.53% Y/Y (7.13% last) Lodging Away From Home 1.5% M/M, 3.2% Y/Y (3.2% last)
- Although the rent data is clearly bad news, there has been a strong campaign against this data to weaken its importance by claiming it’s just really lagged. That’s partly true but the recent research on the subject has enormous error bars for short-term forecasts so…
- Some ‘COVID’ Categories: Airfares -3.12% M/M (-3.02% Last) *** Lodging Away from Home 1.47% M/M (-0.71% Last) *** Used Cars/Trucks -2.55% M/M (-2.95% Last) *** New Cars/Trucks -0.06% M/M (0.04% Last)
- So, I was ‘on’ core even though I was wrong on airfares (it was weak, despite the fact that every fare I saw in December was about 2x normal). Used cars was the predicted drag, and New cars was not…but I was low on rents. That’s the ‘away from mean surprise’.
- Incidentally, Lodging Away from Home was quite strong – and is one of those core-services-ex-rents that is driven a lot by wages.
- Piece 1: Food & Energy: 9.31% y/y
- Piece 2: Core Commodities: 2.15% y/y
- Piece 3: Core Services less Rent of Shelter: 6.34% y/y
- …and here is the spoiler: it wasn’t all rents. Core services less rents still strong. I’ll drill down further in a bit.
- Piece 4: Rent of Shelter: 7.59% y/y
- So, the swap market gets closest-to-the-pin on headline (SA). -0.079% was the figure, a bit lower than consensus econs and a fair bit lower than me. On Core, econs and I were both pretty close as it was right around 0.3% (0.303%).
- I had managed to talk myself into the idea that food and energy would be a bit less of a drag than my model said, but food wasn’t up as much as it has recently been. Ergo, right on core and off on headline.
- Interesting story in Medical Care, which has been a drag recently because of the huge adjustment to insurance company margins (huge and unlikely, btw). Doctors’ Services is slowly reaccelerating a little. Hospital Services continues to have problems getting sufficient sample.
- Overall, Medical Care was up 0.1% m/m, but that’s after the continuing ‘insurance’ drag. Y/Y it was at 3.96%, down from 4.15% but looking like it’s leveling out.
- The median category in the Median CPI will be Food Away from Home, +4.63% annualized monthly number. And the y/y Median will decline very slightly again. Was 7.00% in Oct, 6.98% in Nov, 6.93% in Dec. But heading down.
- Biggest upward m/m movements in core categories were in Jewelry/Watches (+48% annualized monthly), Mens/Boys Apparel (+22%), Lodging Away from Home (+20%), Motor Vehicle Maint/Repair (+13%), and South Urban OER.
- • Biggest decliners were energy things, including Public Transportation, plus Used Cars (-27% annualized monthly figure), and Car/Truck Rental (-18%).
- Core ex-shelter: this includes core goods decelerating rapidly and core services accelerating so perhaps isn’t as useful as sometimes: 4.48% y/y, down from 5.2% last month and the lowest since April 2021. But if it stayed there, then it’s hard to get core to 2%.
- While I’m waiting for the diffusion stuff to calculate, a word on what this does to the Fed: nothing. The Fed is aiming for 5% and then will keep rates high for a while unless something breaks.
- Do markets love this data today because it means they were worried about a more-hawkish Fed, with higher rates or higher-for-longer? Or do they think it means the Fed will in fact start easing this year as the curves impound?
- In my view, the latter is really unlikely. I can see the Fed starting QE again if auctions start getting difficult, but in my view there’s no evidence here that we’re going right back to 2% inflation and the Fed has been loudly consistent about this.
- To be sure, they can turn on a dime and they have previously, but…I just think market pricing is really optimistic.
- This [chart below] is consistent with the good news from Median – for the first time, our diffusion index has declined smartly. It’s still above the highs of the last couple of inflation ‘spikes’ (which no longer look like spikes!), but moderating.
- This chart is not quite as good. The mean CPI is falling more because some high outliers (cars e.g.) are coming back to the pack, and some are moving from low to the low tail, and less because the middle is shifting a lot. Look at how >5% is barely declining.
- I mean, that’s not TERRIBLE news, but obviously we need to see the “<2%” get close to 50% if the Fed is going to be confident they’re back near their inflation target. • One more point and then I’ll prep for the call. A lot of the positive-news things are well along towards delivering what they’re going to deliver. Health ins won’t be a drag in 2024. Used cars won’t drop another 20%. And >>
- >>the dollar has turned south so core goods won’t be in retreat forever. The case for inflation going back to 2% rests on rents turning, and on wages slackening. And while those are expected, there are scant signs of them yet. So hold off on the celebrations in the Eccles bldg.
- OK, let’s wrap up and get to the call. Thanks for subscribing. at 9:35ET I’ll be on this call; join if you want to hear me say what I just tweeted. 🙂 [NUMBER REDACTED]
The CPI figure was broadly in line with expectations, which means it was a “something for everybody” kind of number. Disinflationists see continued broad progress towards the Fed’s 2% PCE target, while sticky-inflation folks see the rents and core-services numbers and shake their heads, tsking ominously.
Two broad observations:
First, the disinflation from core goods is ‘on schedule,’ with Used Cars and other core goods categories doing approximately what they are expected to do. But the problem is that core goods inflation is down to 2.1%. If you are looking for the whole number to go back to what it was pre-COVID, you need core goods in mild deflation and core services down to 3%. But both parts of that story are difficult. With the world de-globalizing and near-shoring, it is going to be difficult to see core goods back in an extended period of mild deflation. Probably 0-1% is the best we can really hope for. And that means that the core goods sponge has been mostly wrung out. And core services back to 3%, even if rents are actually peaking (and just not showing up in CPI yet)? Well, core services-ex-rents remain pretty buoyant. So how do we get that back to 3%?
Second. The interesting part of the story is coming up. Inflation is probably returning to “the mean,” but what is the mean inflation now? For a quarter-century it was stable at 2-2.5%, but prior to that it had never been very stable. There are feedback loops in inflation, and those appear visibly to be at work here: higher wages help support higher services inflation, and rents, which in turn support higher wages. Social Security and other wage agreements that are explicitly linked to inflation help this process along. But it means this: the mean is not stationary. The real question of 2023, and probably 2024, is this: what is the mean, now?
My guess? It’s 4%ish, or even slightly higher. It’s very unlikely to still be 2-2.5%. Ergo, it is going to be very hard for the Fed to end 2023 in a happy mood…which means that it is going to be hard for investors to end 2023 in a happy mood!
Season(al)’s Greetings
As we move into 2023, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to write more frequently on the blog and post podcasts more frequently. I have a list of topics that is certainly long enough. When I was writing commentary for Bankers Trust, and for Barclays, and for Natixis, I wrote every day and somehow I never ran out of words…
Sometimes, as with today’s article, I am going to refer to pictures and observations that I have previously made on the private/subscription Twitter channel. You can subscribe to the Private Twitter feed at https://inflationguy.blog/shop/ . Not only that, but as of January 2023 I have marked the price down from $99 to only $69, which is a 30% nominal decline in the subscription price – and a 35% or so real decline. (Those of you who subscribed at the $99 price unfortunately will have to cancel and re-subscribe to get the lower price because there’s no way for me to edit a recurring subscription’s price, which annoys me as much as it annoys you but I suppose it’s to keep unscrupulous sellers from raising the price without your permission).
Today I want to present some oldie-but-goodie charts that I developed years ago to look at the seasonality of inflation breakevens. In updating the charts, what was amazing is that…the seasonality hasn’t changed much. Fairly consistently, breakevens rise in the early part of the year, and then decline from May to October. It’s not a guarantee,[1] but it is a pretty consistent tendency. The chart below shows, in black, the percentage of the time (1999-2021, so 22 years of history) in which 10-year breakevens increased in the 60 days following that date. So, on January 3rd, the number was about 70% which means that in 70% of those years, breakevens were higher 60 days after January 3rd than on January 3rd. The average increase (including years in which it decreased) is in red, and shows about 10bps on average. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s an average of over 22 years. Buying breakevens early in the year is typically a good idea.
The next chart steps back and shows the average for the full year, properly de-trending the data so that any drift over time falls out (since breakevens have gone basically nowhere for a quarter-century, this doesn’t do much but it’s the right way). So, breakevens start the year below the level that will subsequently be the average, and by May they’re well above that level. Ergo, it has historically been good to be long into the first part of May. And then I guess you sell in May and go away, to coin a phrase.
None of this is guaranteed, as I said, but seasonal patterns which are consistent are valuable tools. The way I look at seasonals is that I want to see a move of some decent economic value, but mainly I want to see the consistency. And personally I won’t do a trade just to take advantage of the seasonal trend, but if I want to sell and the market shows a strong tendency to rally then I might consider “flat” the same as selling in that environment. Conversely, a market which has a strong tendency to rally when I want to buy is likely to make me be more aggressive getting in rather than trying to steal a tick on the bid/offer by hanging out on the bid. If you’re bearish on breakevens, then I don’t think you should be a buyer just because it’s a good time of the year to buy. But between the low level of breakevens, and the seasonal trend itself…I would be cautious about being aggressively short.
[1] …and some of it is an artifact: in the early part of the year, a breakeven buyer often has negative carry from bad inflation prints in November and December; as that carry passes, breakevens rise. But this only explains part of the early-season seasonality, not the whole thing.
