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Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets (Apr 2018)
Below is a summary of my post-CPI tweets. You can (and should!) follow me @inflation_guyPV and get this in real time, by going to PremoSocial. Or, sign up for email updates to my occasional articles here. Investors with interests in this area be sure to stop by Enduring Investments or Enduring Intellectual Properties. Plus…buy my book about money and inflation. The title of the book is What’s Wrong with Money? The Biggest Bubble of All; order from Amazon here.
- After a couple of weeks of relative quiet on the inflation theme, it seems people the last few days are talking about it again. Big coverage in the Daily Shot about the underlying pressures.
- I don’t normally pay much attention to PPI, but it’s hard to ignore the momentum that has been building on that side of things. In particular, the medical care index that PCE uses has been rising rapidly in the PPI. Doesn’t affect us today w/ CPI but affects the Fed convo.
- But back on CPI. Of course the main focus this month for the media will be the dropping off of the -0.073% m/m figure from March 2017, which will cause y/y CPI to jump to around 2.1% from 1.8%. It’s a known car wreck but the reporters are standing at the scene.
- That year-ago number of course was caused by cell phone services, which dropped sharply because of the widespread introduction of ‘unlimited data’ plans which the BLS didn’t handle well although they stuck to their methodology.
- Consensus expectations for this month are for 0.18% on core, which would cause y/y to round down to 2.1%. (Remember that last month, core y/y was very close to rounding up to 1.9%…that shortfall will make this month look even more dramatic.)
- It would only take 0.22% on core to cause the y/y number to round UP to 2.2%, making the stories even more hyperventilated.
- I don’t make point estimates of monthly numbers, because the noise swamps the signal. We could get an 0.1% or an 0.3% and it wouldn’t by itself mean much until we knew why. But I will say I think there are risks to a print of 0.22% or above.
- First, remember the underlying trend to CPI is really about 0.2% anyway. Median inflation is 2.4% and after today core will be over 2%. So using the last 12 months as your base guess is biased lower.
- Also, let’s look back at last month: Apparel was a big upside surprise for the second month in a row, while shelter was lower than expected. But…
- But apparel was rebounding from two negative months before that. We’re so used to Apparel declining but really last month just brought it back up to trend. And with the trade tensions and weak dollar, am not really shocked it should be rising some.
- Apparel is only +0.40% y/y, so it’s not like it needs to correct last month.
- On the other hand, OER decelerated to 0.20 from 0.28 and primary rents decelerated to 0.20 from 0.34, m/m. But there’s really no reason yet to be looking for rent deceleration – housing prices, in fact, are continuing to accelerate.
- No reason to think RENTAL costs should be decelerating while PURCHASE costs are still accelerating. Could happen of course, but a repeat of last month’s numbers is less likely.
- Finally – this gets a little too quanty even for me, but I wonder if last month’s belly flop in CPI could perturb the monthly seasonal adjustments and (mistakenly) overcorrect and push this month higher. Wouldn’t be the first time seasonals bedeviled us.
- I don’t put a lot of weight on that last speculation, to be clear.
- Market consensus is clearly for weakness in this print. I’m just not so sure the ball breaks that way. But to repeat what I said up top: the monthly noise swamps the signal so don’t overreact. The devil is in the details. Back up in 5 minutes.
- ok, m/m core 0.18%. Dang those economists are good. y/y to 2.12%.
- After a couple of 0.18s, this chart looks less alarming.
- OK, Apparel did drop again, -0.63% m/m, taking y/y to 0.27%. So still yawning there. Medical Care upticked to 1.99% from 1.76% y/y, reversing last month’s dip. Will dig more there.
- In rents, OER rose again to 0.31% after 0.20% soft surprise last month, and primary rents 0.26% after a similar figure. y/y figures for OER and Primary Rents are 3.26% and 3.61% respectively. That primary rent y/y is still a deceleration from last mo.
- Core services…jumped to 2.9% from 2.6%. Again not so surprising since cell phone services dropped out. So that’s the highest figure since…a year ago.
- Core goods, though, accelerated to -0.3% from -0.5%. That’s a little more interesting. It hasn’t been above 0 for more than one month since 2013, but it’s headed that way.
- Within Medical Care…Pharma again dragged, -0.16% after -0.44% last month…y/y down to 1.87% from 2.39% two months ago. So where did the acceleration come from?
- Well, Hospital Services rose from 5.01% to 5.16% y/y, which is no big deal. But doctors’ services printed another positive and moved y/y to -0.83% from -1.27% last month and -1.51% two months ago. Still a long way to go there.
- Oh wait, get ready for this because the inflation bears will be all about “OH LODGING AWAY FROM HOME HAD A CRAZY ONE-MONTH 2.31% INCREASE.” Which it did. Which isn’t unusual.
- Interestingly those inflation bears who will tell us how Lodging Away from Home will reverse next month (it will, but hey folks it’s only 0.9% of the index) are the same folks always telling us that AirBnB is killing hotel pricing. MAYBE NOT.
- Finally making it back to cars. CPI Used cars and trucks had another negative month, -0.33% after -0.26% last month. That really IS a surprise: we’ve never seen the post-hurricane surge that I expected.
- Sure, used cars are out of deflation, now +0.37% y/y. New cars still deflating at -1.22% vs -1.47% y/y last month. But that really tells you how bad the inventory overhang is in autos. Gonna suck to be an auto manufacturer when the downturn hits. As usual.
- Leased cars and trucks, interestingly (only 0.64% of CPI) are +5.26% y/y. Look at that trend. Maybe that’s where the demand for cars is going.
- Oh, how could I forget the star of our show! Wireless telephone services went to -2.41% y/y from -9.43% y/y last month. Probably will go positive over next few months – a real rarity! But after “infinity” data where does the industry go on pricing? Gotta be in the actual price!
- College tuition and fees: 1.75% y/y from 2.04%. Lowest in a long time. This is a lagged effect of the big stock and bond bull market, and that effect will fade. Tuition prices will reaccelerate.
- Bigger picture. Core ex-housing rose to 1.23% from 0.92%. Again, a lot of that is cell phone services. But deflation is deep in the rear-view mirror.
- While I’m waiting for my diffusion stuff to calculate let’s look ahead. We’re at 2.1% y/y core CPI now. The next m/m figures to “roll off” from last year are 0.09, 0.08, 0.14, and 0.14.
- In other words, core is still going to be accelerating optically even if there’s no change in the underlying, modestly accelerating trend. Next month y/y core will be 2.2%, then 2.3%, then 2.4%. May even reach 2.5% in the summer.
- This is also not in isolation. The Underlying Inflation Gauge is over 3% for the first time in a long time. Global inflation is on the rise and Chinese inflation just went to the highest level it has seen in a while.
- One of the stories I’m keeping an eye on too is that long-haul trucker wages are accelerating quickly because new technology has been preventing drivers from exceeding their legal driving limits…which has the effect of restraining supply in trucking capacity.
- …and that feeds into a lot of things. Until of course the self-driving cars or drone air force takes care of it.
- The real question, of course, is whence inflation goes after the summer. I believe it will continue to rise as higher interest rates help to goose money velocity after a long time. But it takes time for that theme to play out.
- time for four-pieces. Here’s Food & Energy.
- Core goods. Consistent with our theme. it’s going higher.
- OK, here’s where cell phone services come in: core services less rent of shelter. So the recent jump is taking us back to where we were a year ago. Real question here is whether medical rallies. Some signs in PPI it may be.
- Rent of Shelter continues to be on our model. Some will look for a reversal in this little jump – not me.
- Another month where one of the OER subindices will probably be the median category so my guess won’t be fabulous. It will probably either be 0.26% m/m on median (pushing y/y to 2.49%), or 0.20% (y/y to 2.44%). Either way it’s a y/y acceleration.
- Oh, by the way…10y breakevens are unchanged on the day. This is the second month of data that was ‘on target,’ but surprised the real inflation bears. There isn’t anything really weird here or doomed to be reversed…at least, nothing large.
- Bottom line for markets is core CPI will continue to climb; core PCE will continue to climb. For at least a few more months (and probably longer, but next 3-4 are baked into the cake). Even though this is known…I don’t know that the Fed and markets will react well to it.
- That’s all for today, unless I think of something in 5 minutes as usually happens. Thanks for subscribing!!
As I said in the tweet series – this was at some level a ham-on-rye report, coming in right on consensus expectations. But some observers had looked for as low as 0.11% or 0.13% – some of them for the second month in a row – and those observers are either going to have to get religion or keep being wrong. There are a couple of takeaways here and one of them is that even ham-on-rye reports are going to cause y/y CPI to rise over the next four months. This is entirely predictable, as is the fact that core PCE will also be rising rapidly (and possibly more rapidly since medical care in the PCE seems to be turning up more quickly). But that doesn’t mean that the market won’t react to it.
There are all sorts of things that we do even though we know we shouldn’t. I would guess that most of us, noticing that our sports team won when we wore a particular shirt or a batter hit a home run when we pet the dog a certain way, have at some point in the past succumbed to the “well, maybe I should do it just in case” aspect of superstition. But there’s more to it than that. In the case of markets, it is well and good to say “I know this isn’t surprising to see year-on-year inflation numbers rising,” but there’s the second-level issue: “…but I don’t know that everyone else won’t be surprised or react, so maybe I should do something.”
By summertime, core CPI will have reached its highest level since the crisis. Core PCE will probably also have reached its highest level since the crisis. Median CPI has been giving us a steadier reading and so perhaps will not be at new highs, but it will be near the highest readings of the last decade. I believe that whether we think it should happen or not, the dot plots will move higher (unless growth stalls, which it may) and markets will have to deal with the notion that additional increases in inflation from there would be an unmitigated negative. So we will start to price that in.
Moreover, I am not saying that there aren’t underlying pressures that may, and indeed I think will, continue to push prices higher. In fact, I think that there is some non-zero chance of an inflationary accident. And, in the longer run, I am really, really concerned about trade. It doesn’t take a trade war to cause inflation to rise globally; it just takes a loss of momentum on the globalization front and I think we already have that. A bona fide trade war…well, it’s a really bad outcome.
I don’t think that just because China has been making concessionary noises that a trade spat with China has been averted. If I were China, then I too would have made those statements: because the last half-dozen Administrations would have been content to take that as a sign of victory, trumpet it, and move on. But the Trump Administration is different (as if you hadn’t noticed!). President Trump actually seems hell-bent on really delivering on his promises in substance, not in mere appearance. That can be good or bad, depending on whether you liked the promise! In this case, what I am saying is – the trade conflict is probably not over. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the usual political dance will play out when the newest dancer is treating it like a mosh pit.
And all of this is pointed the same direction. It’s time, if you haven’t yet done it, to get your inflation-protection house in order! (And, one more pitch: at least part of that should be to subscribe to my cheapo PremoSocial feed, to stay on top of inflation-related developments and especially the monthly CPI report! For those of you who have…I hope you feel you’re getting $10 of monthly value from it! Thanks very much for your support.)
Little Trouble in Big China
It is obviously time for another update. I haven’t been an active poster recently, because as many of you know I am busy working on a book for the Wiley label. I am about 80% done; however, it is very time-consuming! The title of the book is (tentatively) What’s Wrong with Money?: The Biggest Bubble of All – and How to Invest with it in Mind, and if you would like to be on the notification list to receive an email when the book is published, simply send an email to WWWM@enduringinvestments.com. Even better, you can pre-order it already apparently, even though it’s not due out until later this year or early next year. (No pressure, huh?)
So, I have been embroiled in the writing and editing process, and not posting much. This will change soon, but China’s overnight move to (slightly) devalue the yuan is significant enough to warrant a post. There are also some other topics that need a quick mark-to-market, but I will save those for another day.
China’s move is possibly qualitatively significant, but I don’t believe it is yet quantitatively significant. A two-percent move in a currency is barely worth recording – it is almost within the daily standard deviation band of some currencies! So, when you have read about how this dramatically changes the inflationary concern of the Fed to a deflationary concern…that’s nonsense. The Swiss Franc strengthened by 20% against all currencies, in a single day, back in January. Since then, the core Swiss inflation rate has moved from +0.4% y/y to -0.6% y/y. Also note that Switzerland’s imports amount to about 50% of its GDP.
Let’s take that as a back-of-the-envelope scalar just to do a rationality check. A 20% change in exchange rate affecting about 50% of goods and services caused a 1% move in core CPI.
The U.S. imports about $40bln in goods from China per month, out of an annual GDP of $16.3 trillion. So in this case, we have a 2% move in exchange rate affecting about 2.9% of domestic goods and services. So if the effect was linear, we would expect about 1/10th * 1/17th * 1% of a move in core CPI as a result of the Chinese action. Check my math, but that would seem to be about 0.006% movement in expected core inflation as a result of China’s revaluation. Negligible, in other words.
Now, qualitatively the effect might be higher if, for example, this presages a more-significant move by China. But even assuming that the exchange rate moved ten times as much, you are still talking about rounding error on inflation. Sure, the effect might not be linear but the essential guess is that from a price perspective we don’t care.
Certain companies and industries and goods, of course, will see a much bigger effect (it would be hard to have a much smaller effect), but it shouldn’t be a big deal – even if it is part of a larger move. From the standpoint of economic growth, it may matter more…but even so, a 2% change is unlikely to matter as much as a 10% change in shipping costs, and moves like that happen all the time.
China is a big economy, and a big trading counterparty of ours. But the U.S. is still a significantly-closed economy. While China represents about 20% of all of our imports, imports as a whole only amount to 14% of US GDP. So, in summary: this is an interesting moment politically, if China is signaling a willingness to float her currency. It is not a particularly interesting day macro-economically, at least from the standpoint of the effect on prices of this move.
The China Syndrome
The last month or two has provided a wonderful illustration of why a diversified commodity index is a better investment than an investment in any given commodity. Since mid-February, April Lean Hogs has rallied 23%. Since late January, May Wheat is up 23%. March Coffee is up 80%. Gold is up 9%. But Crude Oil is 6% off its highs. Copper is 12% off its highs (8% since Thursday). April Nat Gas was up 42% from November through late February, but has lost 10% since then.
This is great if you happened to be 100% in Coffee, and bad if you happened to be heavy into copper or RIO or BHP. But this sort of volatility and non-correlation is exactly where much of the return to commodity indices, over the long run, comes from. Later this month, commodity indices will sell coffee and buy copper, systematically buying low and selling high. This phenomenon is worth on average a couple of points of return per year.
Most commentators seem to be focusing on the precipitous decline in copper prices, supposedly because “Doc Copper” is supposed to be a good leading indicator of economic growth. But in this case, the behavior of copper is mostly due to quasi-panic over China’s recently flagging growth figures. Although China is not the only consumer of copper (although sometimes you might think so, from the news coverage), prices are set at the margin and if there was an actual recession in China as opposed to a modest slowdown, then this would push copper prices lower.
But that would be terrific for Europe and the U.S., because it would mean cheaper copper for us. Similarly, decreasing Chinese growth would relax some pressure on energy prices, which would also be a boon for the Western world. I think people forget that one of the key reasons the “Asian Contagion” from the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis never happened (U.S. growth “bottomed” at 4.1% in mid-1998 – a level it hasn’t reached since 2004) was not because of Federal Reserve action (from March 1997 until August 1998, the Fed Funds target never budged from 5.5%) but because commodity prices plunged from 1997 into 1999. The DJ-UBS index fell from around 128 one month before the Thai baht collapsed to 75 in the first quarter of 1999 (see chart, source Bloomberg).
Even worse (or better, depending on your perspective) was the decline in energy. Crude oil dropped 55%, from the $25 area at the beginning of 1997 to $11 by late 1998. That remains the lowest real price of U.S. oil recorded since 1946 (see chart, source Enduring Investments using data from Dow Jones and the Bureau of Labor Statistics).
It may be impolitic to say so, but probably the single best thing that could happen to U.S. growth would be for Chinese growth to slow, pushing the price of important commodity prices lower. As a nation, we consume far more commodities than we produce, so lower input prices is a net positive.
However, I suspect this is much ado about nothing. Chinese growth, even if it slows, is likely to remain plenty hot enough to keep commodity prices from falling very much, even in real terms. Real commodity prices have been falling steadily since 2011 (which is why all of the talk about the “end of the commodity supercycle” a year ago was so humorous) until early this year, even while the amount of currency in circulation has steadily increased. It certainly seems to me as if we have priced commodities fairly conservatively, and they can probably withstand a growth slowdown in China as long as the country doesn’t enter a bona fide crisis.
