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Union Power and Inflation
One of the biggest stories of the past week has been the synchronized strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW) against the Big Three auto makers in Detroit. Although so far only 13,000 workers out of the 146,000 who pledge allegiance to the UAW have struck, the strategy of striking against each of the Big Three at the same time is interesting. In the past, the UAW would choose a particular automaker to strike, win concessions from that company, and then use the new contract as the basis to cudgel the other automakers into a similar deal. This would completely shut down one company, but not the entire country’s car-making capacity. In this case, the UAW is significantly impacting operations at all three while not completely shutting down any of them – although the implicit threat is that they could, at any time, do so.
What is also interesting is that the demands of the union are aggressive, not to say ambitious. The union is asking for a 36% increase in pay, implemented over four years…plus a reduction to a 32-hour work-week while being paid for 40 hours. Combined, those two demands represent a 70% increase in compensation per hour for a union employee (or, put another way, assuming that a car can’t suddenly be made with 20% less labor, it means the cost of labor going into the vehicle will increase 70%). Additionally, they want a restoration of defined-benefit pension plans and contracted cost-of-living adjustments, which isn’t included in that 70% figure.
Whether or not the union is able to get a sizeable portion of its demands (so far, the auto companies have offered 20% over four years, but the other components of the deal are at least as important), this clearly stands out as one of the most audacious labor asks of the last quarter-century. The timing should not be surprising. Historically, union size and activism is positively related to the level of inflation (see chart, source BLS).
You might think that unions also strengthen when unemployment is high. This is not as true as you would think: when unemployment is high, the union would be asking a company to deliver jobs even though there is no work to be done and the company’s viability may be threatened by a weak economy. Consequently, union actions in a recession tend to be less vigorous (the UAW in fact points out that they made concessions in the Global Financial Crisis to help keep automakers afloat), and unionization is less valuable to the workers in those cases. But in inflation, the union is asking the company to give more to the workers it has and needs, out of its growing revenues and profits (even though those revenues and profits look less impressive, and may even be shrinking, after inflation). Moreover, while unemployment hurts the workers who are unemployed (and unable to pay union dues, also), inflation hurts all workers. Consequently, it is inflation and not unemployment that energizes unions.
Naturally, this is part of the feedback loop that concerns policymakers. When I talk about the wage-price feedback loop, I’m generally talking about how it manifests in core services ex-shelter (“supercore”), where a large part of the cost of the product is labor. In the case of a car, labor is only about 15% – although the exact figure depends who you ask and whether you’re asking about the percentage of cost or the percentage of price. So a 70% increase in that cost would “only” add about 10% to the cost/price of a new car whereas a 70% increase in the cost of an accountant would raise the cost of getting your taxes done by something pretty close to 70%. However, union power has its own momentum, and it manifests in things like (for example) automatic cost-of-living adjustments and persistent pressure on fringe benefits and pensions from a union whose influence in this sort of environment is growing.
That’s not to say that it’s good or bad – but this is another cost of letting the short-term inflation spike linger on by not addressing it by aggressively shrinking the balance sheet early on. The longer inflation stays higher, the more power unions have. And the more power unions have, the more momentum inflation has.
The Phillips Curve is Still Working Just Fine
About five and a half years ago, I wrote a blog article entitled “The Phillips Curve is Working Just Fine, Thanks”, in response to the exhaustively-repeated nonsense that the ‘Phillips Curve is Broken.’ This nonsense never really goes away, but last week Fed Governor Waller delivered a speech on “The Unstable Phillips Curve,” derived from the same nonsense, and I felt duty-bound to resurrect my prior article and update it. The Phillips Curve has not been unstable at all, over the last quarter century at least. Here is my original article, linked here:
I must say that it is discouraging how often I have to write about the Phillips Curve.
The Phillips Curve is a very simple idea and a very powerful model. It simply says that when labor is in short supply, its price goes up. In other words: labor, like everything else, is traded in the context of supply and demand, and the price is sensitive to the balance of supply and demand.
Somewhere along the line, people decided that what Phillips really meant was that low unemployment caused consumer price inflation. It turns out that doesn’t really work (see chart, source BLS, showing unemployment versus CPI since 1997).
Accordingly, since the Phillips Curve is “broken,” lots of work has been done to resurrect it by “augmenting” it with expectations. This also does not work, although if you add enough variables to any model you will eventually get a decent fit.
And so here we are, with Federal Reserve officials and blue-chip economists alike bemoaning that the Fed has “only one model, and it’s broken,” when it never really worked in the first place. (Incidentally, the monetary model that relates money and velocity (via interest rates) to the price level works quite well, but apparently they haven’t gotten around to rediscovering monetarism at the Fed).
But the problem is not in our stars, but in ourselves. There is nothing wrong with the Phillips Curve. The title of William Phillips’ original paper is “The Relation between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957.” Note that there is nothing in that title about consumer inflation! Here is the actual Phillips Curve in the US over the last 20 years, relating the Unemployment Rate to wages 9 months later.
The trendline here is a simple power function and actually resembles the shape of Phillips’ original curve. The R-squared of 0.91, I think, sufficiently rehabilitates Phillips. Don’t you?
I haven’t done anything tricky here. The Atlanta Fed Wage Growth Tracker is a relevant measure of wages which tracks the change in the wages of continuously-employed persons, and so avoids composition effects such as the fact that when unemployment drops, lower-quality workers (who earn lower wages) are the last to be hired. The 9-month lag is a reasonable response time for employers to respond to labor conditions when they are changing rapidly such as in 2009…but even with no lag, the R-squared is still 0.73 or so, despite the rapid changes in the Unemployment Rate in 2008-09.
So let Phillips rest in peace with his considerable contribution in place. Blame the lack of inflation on someone else.
Before I add to my rant, let me update the chart above with data since then, including the pandemic. The green dots in the chart below correspond to the dots in the chart above; the blue dots are for the period since then.
Amazingly, even during the pandemic and post-pandemic period, the Phillips Curve did a pretty decent job of describing the basic shape of this relationship. The dots overall are a bit higher; that’s attributable I think to the fact that inflation itself is higher and I’ve done this chart in nominal terms. There is some money illusion operating (or else the latest dots would be a lot higher), but it’s still a pretty nice fit, considering. I’ve preserved the prior regression line, but it doesn’t really shift very much.
In fact, the deviation prior to the pandemic – the little knot of blue dots to the left – are somewhat more surprising in a way, given the much lower economic volatility that there was when those points were laid down. But in any event, though, there is nothing obviously wrong with the Phillips Curve.
Now, it is true that the Unemployment Rate and the rate of consumer inflation have not been particularly well-behaved. But that isn’t a new phenomenon; that particular inconvenience has been that way for decades. The reason is pretty straightforward, and only confusing if you spent too much time getting a PhD and getting taught dumb things: the connection between wages and prices is not 1:1. It’s not constant. And there’s no particular reason that it should be, because labor is just one input into production costs, and the cost of production just affects the supply side of the supply/demand interplay which determines price. The really weird thing is that anyone ever thought that prices would be set by taking the current wage cost and adding a simple and stable markup.
A wage is just the price of labor, which is set in the market for labor, which involves the demand for labor and the supply of labor. The supply of labor changes very slowly. The demand for labor moves with the economic cycle. When the economic cycle is ebbing, the demand for labor falls – and that causes the quantity of labor demanded to decline (the unemployment rate goes up) as it also causes the price of labor to fall. That’s what happens when a demand curve shifts leftward on a mostly-static supply curve: Q down, P down. When the economic cycle is flowing, the demand for labor rises, which causes the quantity of labor demanded to increase (the unemployment rate declines) and the price of labor to rise. It isn’t that hard. In fact, you learn that in pretty much the first semester of economics.
It’s those later semesters that screw up economists, encouraging them to design complicated models that are very pretty but don’t necessarily relate to real-world dynamics. We should not be at all surprised when those models don’t work in the real world.
But don’t blame Phillips.
Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets (December 2021)
Below is a summary of my post-CPI tweets. You can (and should!) follow me @inflation_guy. Or, sign up for email updates to my occasional articles here. Investors, issuers and risk managers with interests in this area be sure to stop by Enduring Investments! Get the Inflation Guy app in your app store! Check out the Inflation Guy podcast!
- Welcome to the first #CPI Day of 2022 (although technically it’s really the last of 2021 since we’re releasing December #inflation figures). Exciting times, as headline inflation might sport a 7% handle and core inflation definitely will be well above 5% y/y.
- The last three numbers have been so broad, so worrisome OUTSIDE of the “Covid Categories”, that even the Federal Reserve is saying the right things. Will they really hike rates 4 times this year? I’m skeptical but we will see.
- Core CPI for October and November were 0.599% and 0.535% m/m, respectively…but most importantly, there wasn’t a clear outlier causing these jumps. Median inflation, which is unaffected by those tails, has had three straight months above 0.45% (5.4% annualized).
- Not only the Fed, but also the market, is finally starting to listen a little. This chart shows the changes from 1 month ago for real rates, inflation expectations, and nominal rates. All higher from mid-December.
- But the theme from economists over the next few months – brace for it – will be “But economists expect inflation to moderate in the months ahead.” You’ll see this everywhere.
- That’s because after easy year-ago comps for the next 3 months, they get difficult in April-June. So, while core inflation should get to 6% in early Q2, the y/y numbers PROBABLY won’t get worse than that (in 2022).
- So, mix that story with “see, the Fed is serious and inflation is already coming down” and you’ll get the touts for stonks going in full force. Don’t worry, be happy. Buy the stuff that Wall Street needs to sell. Etc.
- And there IS some good news. For example, the rate of increase in overland truckload rates is declining. Still high, but declining. Since trucking goes into all kinds of goods, it’s often a leader of the rate of change (not always).
- Similarly, some modest good news from global shipping rates, which are down from their highs although edging back up a little (chart shows east-west container rates).
- but … Other than those big base effects in April/May/June, there’s not a lot of reason to think the m/m #inflation figures will drop down to 0.15-0.2 again.
- Going forward there will be a peak…but won’t be as serious as you think. We can all imagine used cars fading eventually. But no one bothers to imagine what will go up. So if you forecast a reversion to the mean for the first and ignore the second, of COURSE you forecast a peak.
- Example: what about insurance? President Biden’s latest plan is to force insurance companies to provide 8 free COVID tests per person per month. Ignore whether the tests exist, but … Who do you think pays for that? Insurance company? Nope. More policy error.
- What about China re-shutting some parts of its economy due to Omicron? Remember, (as I wrote in February 2020): “COVID-19 in China is a Supply Shock to the World” https://inflationguy.blog/2020/02/25/covid-19-in-china-is-a-supply-shock-to-the-world/ This is not policy error, just bad luck. But bad luck happens.
- Last month I said “This is not about the pandemic any longer; it is about policy response to the pandemic. It is almost entirely policy error.” I feel strongly about this. While there is tough talk on this from the Fed, let’s see if it’s followed by tough action.
- I’m concerned about that, since the Fed is still getting the story wrong. Powell says higher labor costs are not driving inflation. Well – that’s because labor costs generally FOLLOW inflation. Labor pushes when they see their own cost of living going up. Not before.
- And thanks to workers’ pricing power, wage increases should rise around another 1% y/y by Q3, based on the current unemployment rate (green). This is good news for workers, bad news for consumers. Wages don’t cause inflation but they DO give it momentum.
- So inflation will peak around April, but core will ebb to maybe 4%, not 2%.
- Back to today’s number. Consensus is 0.4%/0.5% headline/core for the month and 7.0%/5.4% y/y. The ‘inside market’ is really 0.46-0.52 on core. The interbank market has the headline figure reaching 7.03%.
- But remember this is December, and there are lots of weird seasonals, so anything can happen.
- We are still watching rents, which should remain solid for a while here. Catching up from the end of the eviction moratorium, but there’s still plenty of heat in the housing market generally. And amazingly, we’re still watching used cars.
- Here’s a chart of the level of used car prices. Not exactly collapsing! I mean, wow! I don’t know anyone who thought we’d get another leg higher.
- And even the rate of change is reaching new highs. So we will likely get another push in the CPI from used autos, and new cars as well since they’re a substitute.
- But most important in today’s #CPI remains the breadth. That’s the main focus today. If we get 0.7% but it’s all used cars, that’s not nearly as significant as if we get 0.4% and there are no outliers at all. That has been the recent story and I expect it to continue.
- Good luck! I will have a summary of all my tweets at https://mikeashton.wordpress.com sometime mid-morning and then I plan to put out an Inflation Guy podcast (https://inflationguy.podbean.com) sometime today. Like, click subscribe, all that.
- Also look for the Inflation Guy app in your app store (once we get enough users we will probably do livestreams to those users, rather than on Twitter).
- And finally, book your free place at the Institutional Fixed Income Virtual Summit on January 22nd. https://lnkd.in/dab2WfEP
- Hey! I finished with the walk-up early. Still time to grab a coffee. Number in 7 minutes.
- A bit higher than expected 0.5%/0.6% on core. Headline did get to 7%, core hit 5.5%. Bloomberg kinda slow-rolling the seasonally-adjusted core number so don’t know the 2nd digit yet.
- OK, here we go. The seasonally-adjusted core number, m/m, was 0.5501. So it just BARELY squeaked out the 0.6%. Still, higher than expected but not drastically.
- Jumping out at me is the 1.72% rise in Apparel prices m/m. Apparel is only 2.7% of the basket but has been in deflation for years, punctuated by occasional attempts at price increases. Right now Apparel is +5.8% y/y. Some of that is likely shipping b/c apparel isn’t made here.
- Used Cars, true to form, +3.5% m/m after +2.5% last month. Y/Y up to 37.3%. New cars +1% m/m.
- Overall, core goods and services continue to look…um…disturbing?
- Here is core services by itself. 4% looks like the big level. However, it’s no longer the case that this inflation is all about goods. Ergo, it isn’t all about supply chain.
- OK in the COVID categories, 1.18% m/m from lodging away from home; +2.72% m/m from airfares. Car and truck RENTAL though was -5.3% m/m. That’s only 0.13% of CPI though!
- Rents: Primary rents +0.39%, 3.33% y/y. That’s slightly lower than the last couple of months but still pretty hot. Owners’ Equivalent Rent +0.40%, 3.79% y/y. Ditto – lower but still hot. 4.8% annualized from a third of core would make it hard to get core back to 2%!
- Medical Care was +0.28% m/m. But Pharma (+0.01%), Doctors’ Services (-0.05%), and Hospital Services (+0.16%) were all lower. Which means it came from insurance.
- Here is medical insurance, y/y. Up 1.6% m/m. Medical insurance is a residual in the CPI (not directly calculated), but this is where added costs to insurance companies is showing up.
- So core inflation at 5.5% is still “the highest since 1991”, but starting next month it will probably be “the highest since 1982” since the 1991 high was 5.6%.
- Vehicle insurance (-16.8% one-month change, annualized) and Car and Truck Rental (-48%) were the only core categories that fell more than 10% annualized.
- Categories that ROSE >10% annualized: Jewelry/Watches (+59%),Used Cars/Trucks(+51%),Womens/Girls Apparel(+30%),Public Transport(+26%),Motor Vehicle Parts/Equip (+21%),Footwear(+20%),Lodging Away from Home(+15%),Household Furnishings(+14%),Mens/Boys Apparel(+14%),New Cars(12%)
- I am afraid this also looks like we are going to have another 0.45% or so on Median inflation. Hard to tell b/c regional OERs are the median categories it looks like, so it might be as low as 0.38% but unlikely I think.
- Core ex-housing is +6.4% y/y. It’s worth remembering that core is currently being pulled DOWN by rents.
- Folks, grab the reins on the change in the CPI weightings. They are a totally normal biannual thing. The changes will be larger this time than normal because consumption patterns changed – but there’s no conspiracy. Consumption patterns DID change. That’s all that’s happening.
- Stories remain approximately the same for the four-pieces charts. The first is Food & Energy – most volatile, and the best chance for dropping the y/y headline number. But still, pretty ugly and this likely affects wage negotiations as people pay more for food and gas!
- Core goods – a chunk is new and used autos. And there is upward pressure from shipping and trucking rates. But those are ebbing a little. This will eventually come back to earth, on a rate of change basis, but that doesn’t mean the price LEVELS will decline.
- Core services ex-rents. This is still looking a little perky although not breaking to new highs like a lot of the rest of the index. Medical Care is actually holding down inflation. But uptick in health insurance is concerning.
- Rent of Shelter – totally expected if you’ve been watching housing. Still has more to go! Again, it’s going to be hard to get core CPI back to 2% while rents are running 4-5% or more.
- Slight good news on distribution. The weight of the consumption basket that’s inflating more-slowly than 3% is back above 25%!
- OK, one more chart and then a quick wrap-up. Remember later to check out the summary at https://mikeashton.wordpress.com and look for the podcast version of it at https://inflationguy.podbean.com
- I said the most important part of this report was the breadth. And it was again a very broad report; Median CPI will again be around 0.4%-0.5%. The Enduring Investments Inflation Diffusion Index reached a modest new high.
- There is nothing in today’s number that suggests the underlying inflation pressures are ebbing. The y/y change will eventually come down because the comps will get more difficult, but there is NO SIGN that core will be dropping back to 2%.
- My base case is that we end 2022 with something like a 4% core inflation rate. Could be as low as 3.5%, but the potential miss on the upside is larger than that.
- The Fed is talking tough, but talk is cheap. They’re still easing at this hour! Eventually they’ll stop digging the hole. When will they start filling it in – not by raising rates which has small effect if any on inflation, but by selling bonds? Don’t hold your breath.
- I think they’ll raise rates once or twice, maybe even thrice if bond and stock markets don’t seem to mind. But eventually, they’ll mind because discount rates matter. When that happens, I can’t imagine the Fed keeps sticking the knife in.
- We have Volcker-like inflation, but we have no Volcker.
- And that’s the problem. Thanks for tuning in! If you’re curious about what we do at Enduring Investments, come by http://enduringinvestments.com and say hi. I do these tweet storms for many reasons – but some of those reasons are commercial! See you soon.
This was, sadly, not a very surprising report. Inflationary pressures remain broad and deep, and the Fed today is still purchasing bonds and adding more reserves to the system. The FOMC is in a bit of a pickle since they labored so long under the false “inflation is transitory” story. The fact that they couldn’t foresee that the natural consequence of massive fiscal stimulus financed by massive monetary stimulus would be inflation is mind-boggling, but it does seem that they really did think that inflation was transitory and caused by supply-chain issues. Amazing.
So now, they’re behind the curve and really need to catch up and get ahead of this process. The inflation mindset is becoming entrenched (and I think already has), and all the Fed can do is talk about how they’re going to be gradual, gradual, a few hikes this year; maybe they’ll eventually think about shrinking the balance sheet; please don’t panic please don’t panic please don’t panic. But the slower the Fed goes, the harder they’ll have to squeeze liquidity to get inflation out of the system. And that will break a few eggs.
Volcker was not afraid to break some eggs. He saw that it was better to break eggs now than to be unable to afford eggs tomorrow. I do not currently see anyone at the Federal Reserve, or in central banking circles generally, made of that stern stuff. Ask me what inflation this year will be and I will say 4-5% on core. Ask me what it will be next year and I’ll say, probably about the same. Ask me what inflation will be in 2025 and I will say…
Do you have a Volcker? Because if not, we’re Volcked.
How Many ‘Shortage’ Anecdotes Equal Data?
There is a growing list of categories of prices which are seeing abnormal price pressures. At least, they are abnormal by the standards of the last quarter-century! A couple of months ago, in “The Risk of Confusing Inflation Frames,” I wrote about some of the effects we might soon be seeing, and of the risk that some of the known-but-temporary effects will obfuscate more serious underlying issues.
In April, we will get the CPI for March; this will be the first CPI release to have ridiculously easy comparisons against the year-ago month. March 2020 was -0.2% on core CPI, and I suspect the consensus estimate for March 2021 will be something like +0.2%; this implies the y/y core inflation number will jump from 1.3% to around 1.7%, depending on rounding. But as I said, that disguises some of the important underlying pressures that may also start to appear with this number. There is an old saying that the plural of “anecdote” isn’t “data,” but eventually there must be a crossover point where the preponderance of independent anecdotes begins to approach the informational value of data, right? Well, here is a short list of some recent anecdotes and reports of shortages.
There has become an acute shortage of semiconductor chips, which has impacted automobile production (and will that increase prices for what is available?). There is a shortage of shipping containers, causing widespread increases in freight costs affecting a wide variety of goods. Packaging materials, which are also a part of the price of a great many goods, are also shooting higher in price. Worker shortages at various skill levels were reported in the most-recent Beige Book. There is a shortage of Uber and Lyft drivers.
There are other effects that have shown up but I misapprehended the significance of them at the time. Apparel prices have risen at an annualized 9% pace over the last four months. I’d attributed that to shipping, but there is more to it than that. In January US Customs issued a Withhold/Release Order (WRO) on cotton and tomato products coming from the Xinjiang region of China, where forced labor is employed; the order calls for the stoppage of freight with any amount of cotton (or tomatoes, but there is not much tomato in apparel) that originates from that region – even if it is only the thread on the hem. While this and the other effects on apparel are probably temporary, we don’t really know how temporary.
Importantly, we should add to these shortages a growing shortage of housing. The inventory of homes available for sale just hit an all-time low (the National Association of Realtors started keeping track in 1982).
And, as a result, the increase in the median sales price of existing homes just reached an all-time high spread over core CPI (home price increases sometimes have been higher, though it is unusual. For example, in May 1979 the year-over-year increase in the median home price was 16.9%. But core inflation was 9.4% at the time, so the real increase in home prices was only 7.5%).
I have written elsewhere about the fact that there is large divergence right now between what the BLS indicates the effective inflation in the cost of housing is, and what a measurement of asking rents suggest it should be. The significant chart is reproduced below – and the short story is that the divergence dates to the imposition of the COVID-related eviction moratorium. This has decreased the amount of rent that landlords actually expect to receive on average, which lowers effective rents even though every other measure of the true (free market) cost of shelter would be, is ratcheting higher at rates seldom if ever seen before.
Now, this moratorium was due to expire at the end of March, but the CDC just extended it until June (which may be one reason that TIPS breakevens have hit some minor resistance). That’s a little unfortunate since it means that the moratorium will expire right about the time that the CPI is enjoying favorable comparisons versus 2020. The understating of rent and owners’-equivalent rent inflation, since those are a huge portion of the consumption basket, has an outsized effect on CPI. I want to be fair here to the BLS: in an important sense, the CPI data on rents is not wrong because in fact if a tenant pays less because of the moratorium, then that tenant’s cost of living really did go down. Even though in a free market without such a moratorium his cost of living would have been higher, that’s not the question the BLS is trying to answer. The cost of living is lower in such a case. Of course, that’s temporary, and so when the moratorium is lifted we can expect the BLS will also faithfully report the catch-up. Which means that in the summer, when we would have expected y/y CPI to start to decline again as it faces more difficult comparisons to 2020…it may not, because rents will start to catch up. That’s going to toast the marshmallows of a lot of investors.
Now, there’s one more facet of the cost-of-shelter question and that’s whether home prices have risen too far, too fast and so it’s home prices and asking rents that will have to decline, rather than effective rents re-accelerating. This is a reasonable question. It is true that the ratio of home prices relative to incomes is getting back to levels that in the late 2000s indicated a bubble was getting ready to pop (see chart). For many, many years median home prices relative to median incomes was fairly stable at around 3.4x. Some increase makes sense since homes have been getting bigger, but it does give the appearance of being overextended.
However, last week in Money Illusion and Boiling Frogs I argued that the nominal value of certain real assets might be usefully compared to the level of the money supply as a way of assessing their real value. Comparing the equity market to M2 made the former look less frothy, and the argument is that maybe equity investors aren’t suffering from “money illusion” in the same way that consumers might be (so far). But the same cannot be said for the housing market. The chart below (Source: Bloomberg) divides the home price index (from the FHFA) by M2. While home prices relative to incomes look high, home prices relative to the stock of money look quite low. It is interesting how the QE of the early 2010s shows up as a one-time shift in this ratio, followed by a period of stability, isn’t it? It suggests that maybe home prices didn’t fully adjust to the new money-stock reality after the bubble’s burst in 2008 and the subsequent QE. And maybe such a one-time shift happens again now.
But it might also be the case that the current rapid escalation of home prices is the market’s attempt to get the real value of the housing stock to reflect the rapidly increasing value of the money stock. If that’s the case, then it also suggests that median wages probably will eventually follow. The last people to respond to money illusion generally are the people selling their labor.
I don’t know if this is the ‘right’ answer, and my purpose in these articles isn’t to give the ‘right’ answer. I just want to ask the right questions…and I feel like these are the right questions.
Developed Country Demographics are Inflationary, not Deflationary
I’m a relatively simple guy. I like simple models. I get suspicious with models that seem overly complicated. In my experience, the more components you add to a model the more likely it is that one of them ceases having explanatory power and messes up your model’s value. In this it is like (since tonight is Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game I thought I’d use a baseball analogy) bringing in relievers to a game. Every reliever you bring in has some chance that he just doesn’t have it tonight, so therefore you ought to bring in as few relievers as you can.
Baseball managers don’t seem to believe this, so they bring in as many relievers as they can. Similarly, economists don’t seem to believe the rule of parsimony. The more complexity in the model, the better (at least, for the economist’s job security).
Let’s talk about demographics and inflation.
Here’s how I think about how an aging population affects inflation:
- Fewer workers in the workforce implies a lower unemployment rate and higher wages, c.p.
- A higher retiree/active worker ratio implies lower saving, which will tend to send interest rates higher and equity prices lower, and tend to increase money velocity, c.p.
- A higher retiree/non-retiree ratio probably implies lower spending, c.p.
It seems to me that people who argue that aging populations are disinflationary don’t really have a useful model in mind. If they do, then it revolves only around #3, and the idea that spending will diminish over time; if you believe that inflation is related to growth then this sounds like stagnation and deflation. But if there’s lower spending, that doesn’t necessarily indicate a wider output gap because of #1. The best you could say about the effect on the output gap of an aging population is that it is indeterminate: potential output growth should decline because of workforce decline (potential output growth » growth in the # of workers + growth in productivity per worker), while demand growth should also decline, leading to uncertain effects on the output gap.
I think that most people who think the demographic situation of developed nations is disinflationary are really just extrapolating from the single data point of Japan. Japan had an aging population; Japan had deflation; ergo, an aging population causes deflation. But as I’ve argued previously, the main cause of deflation in Japan was overly tight monetary policy.
The decrease in potential growth rates due to the graying of the population is real and clearly inflationary on its face, all else equal. Go look at our MVºPQ calculator and see what happens when you lower the annual real growth assumption, for any other set of assumptions.
So, my model is simple, and you don’t need to have a lot of extraneous dynamics if you simply say: slower potential growth implies higher potential inflation, and demographics implies lower potential future growth. Qed.
One other item I would point out about the three points above: all three are negative for stock markets. If you truly believe that the dominant effects are lower spending, less savings, and higher wages the you can’t possibly think that demographics are anything other than disastrous for equity valuations in the future.
Potpourri for $500, Alex
When I don’t write as often, I have trouble re-starting. That’s because I’m not writing because I don’t have anything to say, but because I don’t have time to write. Ergo, when I do sit down to write, I have a bunch of ideas competing to be the first thing I write about. And that freezes me a bit.
So, I’m just going to shotgun out some unconnected thoughts in short bursts and we will see how it goes.
Wages! Today’s Employment Report included the nugget that private hourly earnings are up at a 2.8% rate over the last year (see chart, source Bloomberg). Some of this is probably due to the one-time bumps in pay that some corporates have given to their employees as a result of the tax cut, and so the people who believe there is no inflation and never will be any inflation will dismiss this.
On the other hand, I’ll tend to dismiss it as being less important because (a) wages follow prices, not the other way around, and (b) we already knew that wages were rising because the Atlanta Fed Wage Tracker, which controls for composition effects, is +3.3% over the last year and will probably bump higher again this month. But the rise in private wages to a 9-year high is just one more dovish argument biting the dust.
As an aside, Torsten Slok of Deutsche Bank pointed out in a couple of charts today that one phenomenon of recent years has been that people staying in the same jobs increasingly see zero wage growth. Although this is partly because wage growth in general has been low, the spread between wage growth for “job switchers” and “job stayers” is now about 1.25% per year, the highest rate in about 17 years. His point is that as we see more switchers due to a tight labor market, that implies more wage growth (again, the Atlanta Fed Wage Growth Tracker does a better job, so this just means average hourly earnings should increasingly converge with the Atlanta Fed figure).
Today I was on the TD Ameritrade Network and they showed a chart that I’d included in our Quarterly Inflation Outlook (which we distribute to customers). I tweeted the chart back on May 22 but let me put it here, with some brief commentary lifted from our quarterly:
“As economic activity has started to absorb more and more unemployed into the workforce, a shortage has developed in the population of truck drivers. This shortage is not easy to overcome, since it takes time to train new truck drivers (and the robo-truck is still no more than science fiction). Moreover, recent advances in electronically monitoring the number of hours that drivers are on the road – there have been rules governing this for a long time, but they relied on honest reporting from the drivers – have artificially reduced the supply of trucker hours at just the time when more were needed because of economic growth…As a result of this phenomenon, total net-of-fuel-surcharge truckload rates are 15% higher than they were a year ago, which is the highest rate of increase since 2004. As the chart (source: FTR Associates and BLS) illustrates, there is a significant connection between truckload rates lagged 15 months and core inflation (0.74 correlation).”
According to FTR Transportation Intelligence, the US is short about 280,000 truck drivers compared to what it needs.
Remember when everyone said Europe was about to head back into deflation, thanks to that surprise dip in core inflation last month? Here is what I had to say about that on my private Twitter feed (sign up here if this stuff matters to you) at the time.
As Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story is that core European CPI printed this month at 1.1%, shocking (almost) everyone for a second month.
I had a conversation recently with a potential client who said they didn’t want to get into a long-commodity strategy because they were afraid of chasing what is hot. It’s a reasonable concern. No one wants to be the pigeon who bought the highs.
But some context is warranted. I didn’t want to be impolite, but I pointed out that what he was saying was that in the chart below, he was afraid it was too late to get on the orange line because it is too hot.
Incidentally, lest you think that I chose that period because it flatters the argument…for every period starting June 30, XXXX and ending June 1, 2018, the orange line is appreciably below the white line and has never been meaningfully above it, for XXXX going back to 2002. For 2002-2011, the two indices shown here were pretty well correlated. Since 2011, it has been a one-way underperformance ticket for commodities. They are many things, but “hot” is not one of them!
I haven’t heard back.
Higher Wages: Good for You, Not Good for Stocks
The documentation of the endless march of asset markets higher has become passé; the illustration of the markets’ overvaluation redundant and tiresome. After years in which these same arguments have been made, without any discernable correction, the sober voices of warning have been discredited and discounted. The defenders of higher valuations have grown more numerous, more vocal, and more bulletproof.
I recently commented in a forum on cryptocurrencies…something to the effect that while I see blockchain as being a useful technology – although one which, like all technologies, will be superseded someday – I don’t expect that cryptocurrency in any of its current forms will survive because they don’t offer anything particularly useful compared to traditional money, and moreover have a considerable trust hurdle to overcome due to the numerous errors, scandals, and betrayals that have plagued the industry periodically since MtGox. Whatever you say about ‘traditional’ money, no one worries that it will vanish from your bank account tomorrow due to some accident. I don’t see anything particularly controversial about that statement, although reasonable people can disagree with my conclusion that cryptocurrency will never gain widespread acceptance. However, the reaction was aggressive and unabashed bashing of my right to have an opinion. I hadn’t even uttered an opinion about whether the valuation of bitcoin is a bubble (it obviously is – certainly there’s no sign of the stability you’d want in a currency!), and yet I almost felt the need to run for my life. The bitcoin folks make the gold nuts look like Caine in the TV show “Kung Fu”: the epitome of calm reasonableness.
But, again, chronicling the various instances of bubble-like behavior has also become passé. It will all make sense after it’s over, when the crowd recovers its senses “slowly, and one by one” as Mackay had it about 170 years ago.
Today though I want to address a quantitative error that I hope is hard to argue with. It has become de rigeur throughout this…let’s call it the recent stages of an extended bull market…to list all of the reasons that a continued rally makes sense. I always find this fascinating because such enumeration is almost never conducted with reference to whether these things are already “in the price.” On the weekend money shows I heard several pundits opine that the stock market’s rally was likely to continue because “growth is pretty good, at around 3%; interest rates are relatively low; inflation is relatively low; government has become more business-friendly, and wages seem to be going up again.” As I say, it seems to me that most of this should already be in the market price of most securities, and not a cause for further advance. But one of those items is in fact a bearish item.
Make no mistake, wages going up is a great thing. And it’s nice to hear that people are finally starting to note that wages are rising (I pointed this out in April of 2016, citing the Atlanta Fed’s macroblog article on the topic, here. But not everyone reads this column, sadly). The chart below shows the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker, against Median CPI.
So wages are going up for continuously-employed persons, and this is good news for workers. But it’s bad news for corporate earnings. Corporate margins have been very high for a very long time (see chart, source Bloomberg), and that’s partly because a large pool of available labor was keeping a lid on wages while weak global demand was helping to hold down commodity input prices.
Higher wages are, in fact, a negative for stocks.
The argument for why higher wages seem like they ought to be a positive for stocks goes through consumption. If workers are earning more money, the thinking goes, then they can buy more stuff from companies. But this obviously doesn’t make a lot of sense – unless the worker is spending more than 100% of his additional wages in consumption (which can happen if a worker changes his/her savings pattern). If a worker earns $10, and spends $9 buying goods, then business revenues rise by less than wage expenditures and business profits fall, all else being equal.
This shows up in the Kalecki profits equation, which says that corporate profits equal Investment minus Household Savings minus Government Savings minus Foreign Savings plus Dividends. (Look up Kalecki Profit Equation on Wikipedia for a further explanation.) Rearranging, Kalecki profits equal Investment, minus Government Savings (that is, surplus…so currently the deficit contributes to profits), minus Foreign Savings, plus (Dividends minus Household Savings). So, if workers save some of their new, higher earnings then corporate profits decline. The chart below shows how the Kalecki decomposition of profits tends to track pretty well with reported business profits (source: Bloomberg).
Now, profit margins have been high over the last year despite the rise in wages (not because of it) because the personal savings rate has been declining (see chart, source Bloomberg).
If wages continue to grow, and workers start to save more of their earnings (paying off credit cards perhaps?), then it means that labor is taking a larger portion of the pie compared to the historically-large portion that has been going to capital. This is good for workers. It is not good for stocks.
Some Further (Minor) Thoughts on the Phillips Curve
Before I begin, let me say that if you haven’t read yesterday’s article, please do because it represents the important argument: the Phillips Curve doesn’t need rehabilitating, because it is working fine. In fact, I would argue that the Phillips Curve – relating wages to unemployment – is a remarkably accurate economic model prediction. The key chart from that article I reproduce here, but the article (which is brief) is worth reading.
Following my publication of that article, I had a few more thoughts that are worth discussing on this topic.
The first is historical. It’s incredibly frustrating to read article after article incorrectly stating what the Phillips Curve is supposed to relate. Of course one writer learns from another writer until what is incorrect becomes ‘common knowledge.’ I was fortunate in that, 30 years ago, I had excellent Economics professors at Trinity University in San Antonio, and I was reflecting on that fact when I said to myself “I wonder if Samuelson had it right?”
So I dug out my copy of Economics by Samuelson and Nordhaus (the best-selling textbook of all time, I believe, and the de rigeur Intro to Economics textbook for generations of economists). My copy is the 12th Edition, so perhaps they have corrected this since then…but on page 247, there it is – the Phillips Curve illustrated as a “tradeoff between inflation and unemployment.” Maybe that is where this error really propagated – with a Nobel Prize-winning economist making an error in his incredibly widely-read text! Interestingly, the authors don’t reference the original Phillips work, but refer to “writers in the 1960s” who made that connection, so to be fair to Samuelson and Nordhaus they were possibly already repeating an error that had been made even earlier.
My second point is artistic. In yesterday’s article, I said “The Phillips Curve…simply says that when labor is in short supply, its price goes up. In other words: labor, like everything else, is traded in the context of supply and demand,…” But students of economics will note that the Phillips Curve seems to obfuscate this relationship, because it is sloping the wrong way for a supply curve – which should slope up and to the right rather than down and to the right. This can be remedied by expressing the x-axis of the Phillips Curve differently – making it the quantity of labor demanded rather than the quantity of labor not demanded…which is what the unemployment rate is. So the plot of wage inflation as a function of the Employment Rate (as opposed to the Unemployment Rate) has the expected shape of a supply curve. More labor is supplied when the prices rise.
Again, this is nuance and not a really important point unless you want your economics to be pretty.
My third point, though, is important. One member of the bow-tied fraternity of Ph.D. economists told me through a friend that “the Phillips Curve has evolved to the relationship between Unemployment and general prices, not simply wages.” I am skeptical of any “evolution” that causes the offspring to be worse-adapted to the environment, but moreover I would argue that whoever led this “evolution” (and as I said above, it looks like it happened in the 1960s) didn’t really understand the way the economy (and in particular, business) works.
There is every reason to think that wages should be tied to available labor supply because one is the price of the other. That’s Microeconomics 101. But if unemployment is going to be a good indicator of generalized price inflation too, then it means that prices in the economy are essentially set as the price of the labor input plus a spread for profit. That is not at all how prices are set. Picture the businessperson deciding how to set prices. According to the “evolved Phillips Curve” understanding, this business owner looks at the wages he/she is paying and then sets the price of the product. But that’s crazy. A business owner considers labor as one input, as well as all of the other inputs, improvements in productivity in producing this good or service in question, competitive pressures, and the general state of the national and local economy. It would be incredible if all of these factors canceled out except for wage inflation, wouldn’t it? So in short, while I would expect that unemployment might have some explanatory power for inflation, I wouldn’t expect that explanatory power to be very strong. And, in fact, it isn’t. (But this isn’t new – it never has had any power.)
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The Phillips Curve is Working Just Fine, Thanks
I must say that it is discouraging how often I have to write about the Phillips Curve.
The Phillips Curve is a very simple idea and a very powerful model. It simply says that when labor is in short supply, its price goes up. In other words: labor, like everything else, is traded in the context of supply and demand, and the price is sensitive to the balance of supply and demand.
Somewhere along the line, people decided that what Phillips really meant was that low unemployment caused consumer price inflation. It turns out that doesn’t really work (see chart, source BLS, showing unemployment versus CPI since 1997).
Accordingly, since the Phillips Curve is “broken,” lots of work has been done to resurrect it by “augmenting” it with expectations. This also does not work, although if you add enough variables to any model you will eventually get a decent fit.
And so here we are, with Federal Reserve officials and blue-chip economists alike bemoaning that the Fed has “only one model, and it’s broken,” when it never really worked in the first place. (Incidentally, the monetary model that relates money and velocity (via interest rates) to the price level works quite well, but apparently they haven’t gotten around to rediscovering monetarism at the Fed).
But the problem is not in our stars, but in ourselves. There is nothing wrong with the Phillips Curve. The title of William Phillips’ original paper is “The Relation between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957.” Note that there is nothing in that title about consumer inflation! Here is the actual Phillips Curve in the US over the last 20 years, relating the Unemployment Rate to wages 9 months later.
The trendline here is a simple power function and actually resembles the shape of Phillips’ original curve. The R-squared of 0.91, I think, sufficiently rehabilitates Phillips. Don’t you?
I haven’t done anything tricky here. The Atlanta Fed Wage Growth Tracker is a relevant measure of wages which tracks the change in the wages of continuously-employed persons, and so avoids composition effects such as the fact that when unemployment drops, lower-quality workers (who earn lower wages) are the last to be hired. The 9-month lag is a reasonable response time for employers to respond to labor conditions when they are changing rapidly such as in 2009…but even with no lag, the R-squared is still 0.73 or so, despite the rapid changes in the Unemployment Rate in 2008-09.
So let Phillips rest in peace with his considerable contribution in place. Blame the lack of inflation on someone else.
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The IMF Tries to Cause Japanese Unemployment
It is rare that I write early on a Monday morning, but today there is this. A story on Bloomberg highlighted the pressure that the IMF is putting on Japan to institute an “incomes policy” designed to nudge (and force, if necessary) companies to increase wages. IMF mission chief for Japan told reporters a couple of weeks ago that “we need policies to support wage increases in Japan;” the Bloomberg article also names a former IMF chief economist and the current president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics as proposing an immediate boost of salaries of 5-10% for unionized workers.
It is truly appalling that global economic policymakers are essentially illiterate when it comes to economic history. The IMF suggestion to institute wage hikes as part of triggering inflation is not a question of misunderstanding macroeconomic models (although it manages to do this as well, since wages follow prices and thus increasing wages won’t cause inflation unless other conditions obtain). At some level, it is a question of ignorance of history. After the stock market crash in 1929, President Hoover persuaded major industrial firms (such as GM, U.S. Steel, and the like) to hold wages constant or raise them. Since prices were falling generally, this had the effect of raising the real cost of production, which of course worsened the subsequent Depression. According to one analysis, this single decision caused GDP loss in the Great Depression to be triple what it otherwise would have been if wages were allowed to adjust (because, again, wages follow prices and are the main mechanism by which a surplus or shortage of labor is cleared). It wasn’t just Hoover, of course: later, FDR established the National Recovery Administration to administer codes of “fair competition” for every industry that established minimum wages and prices. The NRA was struck down in large part by the Supreme Court, but the notion of arresting deflation by adjusting wages was quickly reintroduced in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
There is wide agreement, although I am sure it is not universal, that preventing markets from adjusting is a big part of what made the Great Depression so Great. And this isn’t theory…it’s history. There is no excuse, other than ignorance, for policymakers to whiff on this one.
Deflation can be bad, but it doesn’t need to come with massive unemployment. In Japan, it has not: the unemployment rate is 3.1%, the lowest it has been since 1995. But push wages higher artificially, and Japan can have the massive unemployment as well. Thanks, IMF.
