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Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets (February 2020)
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 with interests in this area be sure to stop by Enduring Investments (updated site coming soon). 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.
- Welcome to CPI day! Before we get started, note that at about 9:15ET I will be on @TDANetwork with @OJRenick to discuss the inflation figures etc. Tune in!
- In leading up to today, let’s first remember that last month we saw a very weak +0.11% on core CPI. The drag didn’t seem to come from any one huge effect, but from a number of smaller effects.
- The question of whether there was something odd with the holiday selling calendar, or something else, starts to be answered today (although I always admonish not to put TOO much weight on any single economic data point).
- Consensus expectations call for +0.2% on core, but a downtick in y/y to 2.2% from 2.3%. That’s not wildly pessimistic b/c we are rolling off +0.24% from last January.
- Next month, we have much easier comparisons on the y/y for a few months, so if we DO drop to 2.2% y/y on core today that will probably be the low for a little while. Feb 2019 was +0.11%, March was +0.15%, April was +0.14%, and May was +0.11%.
- So this month we are looking to see if we get corrections of any of last month’s weakness. Are they one-offs? We are also going to specifically watch Medical Care, which has started to rise ominously.
- One eye also on core goods, though this should stay under pressure from Used Cars more recent surveys have shown some life there. Possible upside surprise because low bar. Don’t expect Chinese virus effect yet, but will look for signs of it.
- That’s all for now…good luck with the number!
- Small upside surprise this month…core +0.24%, and y/y went up to 2.3% (2.27% actually).
- We have changes in seasonal adjustment factors and annual and benchmark revisions to consumption weights this month…so numbers are rolling out slowly.
- Well, core goods plunged to -0.3% y/y. A good chunk of that was because Used Cars dropped -1.2% this month, down -1.97% y/y.
- Core services actually upticked to 3.1% y/y. So the breakdown here is going to be interesting.
- Small bounce in Lodging Away from Home, which was -1.37% m/m last month. This month +0.18%, so no big effect. But Owners Equivalent Rent jumped +0.34% m/m, to 3.35% y/y from 3.27%. Primary Rents +0.36%, 3.76% y/y vs 3.69%. So that’s your increase in core services.
- Medical Care +0.18% m/m, 4.5% y/y, roughly unchanged. Pharma fell -0.29% m/m after +1.25% last month, and y/y ebbed to 1.8% from 2.5%. That goes the other way on core goods. Also soft was doctors’ services, -0.38% m/m. But Hospital Services +0.75% m/m.
- Apparel had an interesting-looking +0.66% m/m jump. But the y/y still decelerated to -1.26% from -1.12%.
- Here is the updated Used Cars vs Black Book chart. You can see that the decline y/y is right on model. But should reverse some soon.
- here is medicinal drugs y/y. You can see the small deceleration isn’t really a trend change.
- Hospital Services…
- Primary Rents…now, this and OER are worth watching. It had been looking like shelter costs were flattening out and possibly even decelerating a bit (not plunging into deflation though, never fear). This month is a wrinkle.
- Core ex-housing 1.53% versus 1.55% y/y…so no big change there. The upward pressure on core today is mostly housing.
- Whoops, just remembered that I hadn’t shown the last-12 months’ chart on core CPI. Note that the next 4 months are pretty easy comps. We’re going to see core CPI accelerate from 2.3%.
- So worst (core) categories on the month were Used Cars and Trucks and Medical Care Commodities, which we’ve already discussed. Interesting. Oddly West Urban OER looks like it was down m/m although my seasonal adjustment there is a bit rough.
- Biggest gainers: Miscellaneous Personal Goods, +41% annualized! Also jewelry, footwear, car & truck rental, and infants/toddlers’ apparel.
- Oddly, it looks like median cpi m/m will be BELOW core…my estimate is +0.22% m/m. That’s curious – it means the long tails are more on the upside for a change.
- Now, we care about tails. If all the tails start to shift to the high side, that’s a sign that the basic process is changing.
- One characteristic of disinflation and lowflation…how it happens…is that prices are mostly stable with occasional price cuts. If instead we go to mostly stable prices with occasional price hikes, that’s an inflationary process. WAY too early to say that’s what’s happening.
- Appliances (0.2% of CPI, so no big effect) took another big drop. Now -2.08% y/y. Wonder if this is a correction from tariff stuff.
- Gotta go get ready for air. Last thing I will leave you with is this: remember the Fed has said they are going to ignore inflation for a while, until it gets significantly high for a persistent period. We aren’t there yet. Nothing to worry about from the Fed.
Because I had to go to air (thanks @OJRenick and @TDAmeritrade for another fun time) I gave a little short shrift on this CPI report. So let me make up for that a little bit. First, here’s a chart of core goods. I was surprised at the -0.3% y/y change, but it actually looks like this isn’t too far off – maybe just a little early, based on core import prices (see chart). Still, there has been a lot of volatility in the supply chain, starting with tariffs and now with novel coronavirus, with a lot of focus on the growth effects but not so much on the price effects.
It does remain astonishing to me that we haven’t seen more of a price impact from the de-globalization trends. Maybe there is some kind of ‘anchored inflation expectations’ effect? To be sure, it’s a little early to have seen the effect from the virus because ships which left before the contagion got started are still showing up at ports of entry. But I have to think that even if tariffs didn’t encourage a shortening of supply chains, this will. It does take time to approve new suppliers. Still I thought we’d see this effect already.
Let’s look at the four pieces charts. As a reminder, this is just a shorthand quartering of the consumption basket into roughly equal parts. Food & Energy is 20.5%; Core Goods is 20.1%; Rent of Shelter is 32.8%; and Core services less rent of shelter is 26.6%. From least-stable to most:
We have discussed core goods. Core Services less RoS is one that I am keeping a careful eye on – this is where medical care services falls, and those indices have been turning higher. Seeing that move above 3% would be concerning. The bottom chart shows the very stable Rents component. And here the story is that we had expected that to start rolling over a little bit – not deflating, but even backing off to 3% would be a meaningful effect. That’s what our model was calling for (see chart). But our model has started to accelerate again, so there is a real chance we might have already seen the local lows for core CPI.
I am not making that big call…I’d expected to see the local highs in the first half of 2020, and that could still happen (although with easy comps with last year, it wouldn’t be much of a retreat until later in the year). I’m no longer sure that’s going to happen. One of the reasons is that housing is proving resilient. But another reason is that liquidity is really surging, so that even with money velocity dripping lower again it is going to be hard to see prices fall. M2 growth in the US is above 7% y/y, and M2 growth in the Eurozone is over 6%. Liquidity is at least partly fungible when you have global banks, so we can’t just ignore what other central banks are doing. Over the last decade, sometimes US M2 was rising and sometimes EZ M2 was rising, but the last time we saw US>7% and EZ>6% was September 2008-May 2009. Before that, it happened in 2001-2003. So central banks are providing liquidity as if they are in crisis mode. And we’re not even in crisis mode.
That is an out-of-expectation occurrence. In other words, I did not see it coming that central banks would start really stepping on the gas when global growth was slowing, but still distinctly positive. We have really defined “crisis” down, haven’t we? And this isn’t a response to the virus – this started long before people in China started getting sick.
So, while core CPI is currently off its highs, it will be over 2.5% by summertime. Core PCE will be running up on the Fed’s 2% target, too. If the Fed maintains its easy stance even then, we will know they are completely serious about letting ‘er rip. I can’t imagine bond yields can stay at 2% in that environment.
RE-BLOG: Britain Survived the Blitz and Will Survive Brexit
Since tomorrow is a big day in the saga of Brexit, I thought I’d re-post the article I wrote on June 24, 2016, when the UK first decided to leave. (You can find the original post here). Two and a half years on, and civilization has not yet collapsed, and in fact the forecasts of immediate and unavoidable disaster have turned out to be somewhat overblown. No matter; people have just rolled the forecasts forward to the actual date of hard Brexit. Buy your canned goods now! My opinion is unchanged – seen from the perspective of a few years, a hard Brexit is not going to be the cataclysm that some predict.
So I see today that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan says this is the worst crisis he has seen. Bigger than the 1987 Crash? Bigger than Long Term Capital? Bigger than the internet bubble collapse? Bigger than the Lehman (et. al.) collapse? Really?
As humans, we tend to have short memories and (ridiculously) short planning horizons. Greenspan, especially in his apparent dotage, has a shorter memory even than he had previously – maybe this is convenient given his record. I don’t want to comment on his planning horizon as that would seem uncharitable.
Why is Brexit bad? The trade arrangements and treaties do not suddenly become invalid simply because the UK has voted to throw off the shackles of her overlords and return to being governed by the same rules they’ve been governed by basically since the Magna Carta. But Jim Bianco crystallized the issue for me this week. He pointed out that while Brussels could let this be a mostly painless transition, it has every incentive to make it as painful as possible. In Jim’s words, “if it isn’t painful then hands shoot up all over Europe to be the next to leave.” That’s an astute political observation, and I think he’s right. The EU will work hard to punish Britain for having the temerity to demand sovereignty.
But Britain survived the Blitz; they will survive Brexit.
Indeed, Britain will survive longer than the Euro. The sun is beginning to set on that experiment. The first cracks happened a few years ago with Greece, but the implausibility of a union of political and economic interests when the national interests diverge was a problem from the first Maastricht vote. Who is next? Will it be Greece, Spain, Italy, or maybe France where the anti-EU sentiment is higher even than it is in the UK? The only questions now are the timing of the exits (is it months, or years?) and the order of the exits.
As I said, as humans we not only have short memories but short planning horizons. From a horizon of 5 or 10 years, is it going to turn out that Brexit was a total disaster, leading to a drastically different standard of living in the UK? I can’t imagine that is the case – the 2008 crisis has had an effect on lifestyles, but only because of the scale and scope of central bank policy errors. In Iceland, which addressed the imbalances head-on, life recovered surprisingly quickly.
These are all political questions. The financial questions are in some sense more fascinating, and moreover feed our tendency to focus on the short term.
A lot of money was wagered over the last few weeks on what was a 52-48 proposition the whole way. The betting markets were skewed because of assumptions about how undecideds would break, but it was never far from a tossup in actual polling (and now perhaps we will return to taking polling with the grain of salt it is usually served with). Markets are reacting modestly violently today – at this writing, the US stock market is only -2.5% or so, which is hardly a calamity, but bourses in Europe are in considerably worse shape of course – and this should maybe be surprising with a 52-48 outcome. I like to use the Kelly Criterion framework as a useful way to think about how much to tilt investments given a particular set of circumstances.
Kelly says that your bet size should depend on your edge (the chance of winning) and your odds (the payoff, given success or failure). Going into this vote, betting on Remain had a narrow edge (52-48) and awful odds (if Remain won, the payoff was pretty small since it was mostly priced in). Kelly would say this means you should have a very small bet on, if you want to bet that outcome. If you want to bet the Leave outcome, your edge was negative but your odds were much better, so perhaps somewhat larger of a bet on Brexit than on Bremain was warranted. But that’s not the way the money flowed, evidently.
Not to worry: this morning Janet Yellen said (with the market down 2.5%) that the Fed stood ready to add liquidity if needed. After 2.5%? In 1995 she would have had to come out and say that every week or two. A 2.5% decline takes us back to last week’s lows. Oh, the humanity!
Just stop. The purpose of markets is to move risk from people who have it to people who want it. If, all of a sudden, lots of people seem to have too much risk and to want less, then perhaps it is because they were encouraged into taking too much risk, or encouraged to think of the risk as being less than it was. I wonder how that happened? Oh, right: that’s what the Fed called the “portfolio balance channel” – by removing less-risky assets, they forced investors to hold more-risky assets since those assets now constitute a larger portion of the float. In my opinion (and this will not happen soon), central banks might consider letting markets allocate risk between the people who want it and the people who don’t want it, at fair prices. Just a suggestion.
One final point to be made today. I have seen people draw comparisons between this episode and other historical episodes. This is refreshing, since it reflects at least some thoughtful attempt to remember history. Not all of these are apt or useful comparisons; I saw one that this is the “Archduke Ferdinand” moment of this generation and that’s just nuts. Europe is not a military powderkeg at the moment and war in Europe is not about to begin. But, to the extent that trade barriers begin to rise again, the idea that this may be a “Smoot-Hawley” moment is worth consideration. The Smoot-Hawley tariff is generally thought to have added the “Great” to the phrase “Great Depression.” I think that’s probably overstating the importance of this event – especially if everybody decides to respect Britons’ decision and try to continue trade as usual – but it’s the right idea. What I want to point out is that while rising tariffs tend to produce lower growth and lower potential growth, they also tend to produce higher inflation. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of Eastern Europe is one big reason that inflation outcomes over the last few decades have been lower than we would have expected for the amount of money growth we have had. The US has gone from producing all of its own apparel to producing almost none, for example, and this is a disinflationary influence. What would happen to apparel prices if the US changed its mind and started producing it all domestically again? Give that some thought, and realize that’s the protectionist part of the Brexit argument.
We can cheer for a victory for independence and freedom, while continuing to fight against any tendency towards economic isolationism. But I worry about the latter. It will mean higher inflation going forward, even if the doomsayers are right and we also get lower growth from Brexit and the knock-on effects of Brexit.
European Inflation Concerns Also Rising?
In this space I write a lot about inflation, but specifically I focus mostly on US inflation. However, inflation is substantially a global process – a paper by two ECB economists in 2005 (and our independent followup) found that nearly 80% of the variance in inflation in the G7 and G12 could be accounted for by a common factor. This observation has investment implications, but I’m not focusing on those here…I’m just presenting that fact to explain why I am about to show a chart of European inflation.
Right, so technically it’s my second article in a row in which I mention European inflation. In last Friday’s “Potpourri for $500, Alex”, I noted that core European inflation rebounded to 1.1% after being counted for dead at 0.7% last month. But what is illustrated above is the inflation swaps market, and so is forward-looking. I think this looks a lot more dramatic: investors expect 5-year European inflation to average 1.5% over the next 5 years (a year ago, they were at 1.1% or so and two years ago the market was at 0.7%), and to converge up towards 1.8% where the 5y, 5y forward inflation swap indicates the approximate long-run expectation since it’s not significantly influenced by wiggles in energy.
What is especially interesting though is not the overall trend. Inflation markets everywhere, with the exception of the UK, have been trending higher for a couple of years – you are forgiven if you hadn’t heard that, but the ‘disinflation’ lobby is strong (most of the equity houses have some skin in the game in that direction, after all). No, what is most interesting to me is that inflation swaps have been trending higher recently even though energy prices have been in retreat and even though European yields (outside of Italy) have mostly been in decline. It isn’t as if Euro area growth has been setting the world afire. The currency has been weakening as US growth seems to be outstripping growth on the continent and as the European ‘experiment’ once again looks to be under stress.
What Euro inflation investors may believe, though, are two things. First, a trade war is really bad for inflation, and probably moreso for Europe than the US since there is a larger external sector. Trade frictions are bad for everyone, of course, but a splintering of the Euro bloc would be the ultimate in trade frictions. Second, the ECB is being much slower to stop QE and raise rates than is the Fed. Heck, the ECB’s deposit facility is still at -0.40%, where it has been for 2016. While I am in the camp that rates are of limited importance when economic liquidity is far larger than the economy demands (that is, when there are inert excess reserves), that’s not a mainstream view and as much as I would like to believe otherwise, markets respond to the mainstream view and not mine!
For some time, we’ve favored European ILB over US ILB, and that has been a steady if unexciting trade. Even after this move, European inflation bonds are still considerably cheap to US TIPS, which are themselves still fairly cheap relative to nominal US rates.
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.
Reforming Priors and Re-Forming Europe
By now, you have probably heard that the sun did not set on the British Empire as a result of BrExit. Here is one chart from Tuesday’s Daily Shot letter – and see that letter for others.
This is not at all shocking. While in the long-term it is possible (though I think unlikely) that Germany and other major European trading partners may choose to reduce the business they do with the UK – business which is bilateral, by the way – the immediate short-term impact of a lower pound sterling was much easier to read. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, I made the bold prediction that “Britain Survived the Blitz and Will Survive Brexit,” and then later that week in a post called “Twits and Brits” I made the fairly out-of-consensus prediction that “For what it’s worth, I think that thanks to the weakening of sterling Brexit is likely to be mildly stimulative to the UK economy, as well as somewhat inflationary, and slightly contractionary and disinflationary to the rest of the world.”
Oh, I should also point out that in early July I asked the question whether UK property price declines were rational, or overdone and concluded that “I don’t believe the current drop in listed UK property funds is a rational response to correcting bubble pricing, and it’s probably a good opportunity for cool-headed investors…and, more to the point, cool-headed investors who aren’t expecting to liquidate investments overnight.” What has happened since? See the chart below (Source: Daily Shot).
I only mention these items in back-patting fashion because (a) I am proud that I responded thoughtfully, rather than hysterically like many analysts, to the Brexit surprise, and (b) I want to promote my credibility when I make the following observation:
Good news for the UK is bad news for the Eurozone. Not for growth or inflation in the Eurozone, but for its very survival.
The audacity of Britain in leaving the EU was shocking to the establishment, but everyone carefully predicted disaster for the ancient empire. They did this not because the economics said it would be that way – as I pointed out, the economics pointed the other way – but because it was in the interest of the common-currency project that there be huge costs to breaking the covenant. The “marriage” of the countries in the Eurozone was difficult and painful, and the ongoing relationship has been difficult on some of the members. If “divorce” is easy – and even worse, if it is beneficial, then the marriage will not last. The experience of the UK so far – not only doing okay, but actually doing well – cannot be escaping notice in Athens or Rome (or Madrid or Lisbon…or Paris).
Now, that doesn’t mean the Euro is doomed to fail next week. But it means that in the next crisis, whether that is Greece redux or Italy or some other ground zero, the Eurozone bosses in Brussels will be lacking a major threat to use to force the recalcitrant nation to accept painful austerity. Remember that it was the threat of a generational depression that helped get Greece into line. How is Greece doing? The chart below (source: Bloomberg) shows that nation’s unemployment rate.
Admittedly it is not a statistically-valid sample, although to be sure it is a sample that matches the a priori arguments of those who suggested that Greece should leave the Euro: the country that exited the EU is doing fine, and better-than-expected, while the country that remained in the Eurozone is actually mired in a depression. Hmmm. So tell me again why my poor country needs to accept austerity to remain in the Eurozone?
So much about policy depends on one’s priors. If your prior expectation is that leaving the Eurozone is likely to be a disaster, then both sides in the negotiation are likely to reach agreement on a relatively smaller inducement to stay than if the prior expectation is that leaving the Eurozone might be a positive event for the leaver. The events to date should cause these priors to shift when the next crisis happens.
Speaking of priors, and changing countries: Friday’s employment report did not seem, to me, to be outside of the range of outcomes that would cause policymaker priors to change. That is, if the Fed Chairman was planning to raise rates later this month, prior to seeing the Employment report, then I wouldn’t expect the report was weak enough to change that course of action. Conversely, if the Chairman (as I believe) was not planning to hike rates, then it doesn’t seem to me that the report was strong enough to change that course of action.
Markets have decreased the implied probability of such a rate hike, compared to what it was before the report. That’s just Mr. Market’s bipolar nature. The 6-month moving average of payrolls was 189k last month; it is 175k now. The 12-month average is exactly unchanged at 204k. There’s nothing here that is out of the ordinary. But if your attitude was that rates should rise because they need to be returned to neutral, then a 151k monthly Non-Farm Payrolls shouldn’t affect that decision. And if your attitude was that the economy might be weakening, and can’t sustain a rate hike, the number doesn’t change your attitude either. So, while Mr. Market has changed the implied probability, I seriously doubt Dr. Yellen wavered at all.
The problem is that we don’t know what Dr. Yellen (and let’s be clear, hers is the only vote which matters) was thinking prior to the number. We don’t know her priors. But, unless the data appreciably strengthens or weakens between now and September 21st, we will know her priors after we see the results from the meeting. My guess continues to be that the Chairman’s operating assumption is that low rates do more good than harm, and that therefore a hike in rates is unlikely until inflation (already above the Fed’s target, and rising) gets quite a bit more above the Fed’s target, or market interest rates signal restlessness with the Fed’s course.
Shooting Blanks
Almost eight years after the bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers and the first of many central bank quantitative easing programs, it appears the expansion – the weakest on record by several measures – is petering out. The Q2 growth rate of GDP was 1.2% annualized, meaning that the last three quarters were +0.9%, +0.8%, +1.2%. That’s not a recession, but it’s also not an expansion to write home about.
But why? Why after all of the quantitative easing? Is the effectiveness waning? Is it time for more?
I read recently about how many economists are expecting the Bank of England to increase asset purchases (QE) this Thursday in an attempt to counteract the depressing effects of Brexit on growth. Some think the increase will be as much as £150 billion. That’s impressive, but will it help?
I also read recently about how the Bank of Japan “disappointed investors” by not increasing asset purchases except incrementally. The analysts said this was disappointing because the BOJ’s action was “not enough to cause growth.”
That’s because no amount of money printing is enough to cause growth. No amount.
It seems like people get confused with this concept, including many economists, because we use units of currency. So let’s try illustrating the point a different way. Suppose I pay you in candy bars for the widgets you produce. Suppose I pay you 10 candy bars, each of which is 10 ounces, for each widget. Now, if I start paying you 11 candy bars instead of 10, then the price has risen and you want to produce more widgets, right? This, indirectly, is what economists are thinking when they think about the effect of monetary policy.
But suppose that I pay you 11 candy bars, but now each candy bar is 9.1 ounces instead of 10 ounces? I suspect you will not be fooled into producing more widgets. You will realize that I am still paying you 100 ounces of candy per widget. You are not fooled by the fact that the unit of account changed in intrinsic value.
Now, when the central bank adds to the money supply, but doesn’t change the amount of stuff the economy produces (they don’t have the power to direct production!), then all that changes is the size of the unit of account – the candy bar, or in this case the dollar – and the number of dollars you need to buy a widget goes up. That’s called inflation. And the only way that printing more money can cause production to increase is if you don’t notice that the value of any given unit of currency has declined. That is, only if I say I’m paying you 11 candy bars – but you haven’t noticed they are smaller – will you respond to the change in terms. This is called “money illusion,” and it is why money printing does not cause growth in theory…and, as it turns out, in practice.[1]
There is nothing terribly strange or unpredictable about what is going on in global growth in terms of the response to monetary policy. The only thing strange is that eight years on, with numerous observations on which to evaluate the efficacy of quantitative easing, the conclusion appears to be that it might not be quite as effective as policymakers had thought. And therefore, we need to do lots more of it, the thought process seems to go. But anything times zero is zero. Central banks are not shooting an inaccurate, awkward weapon in the fight to stimulate growth, which just needs to be fired a lot more so that something eventually hits. They are shooting blanks. And no amount of shooting blanks will bring down the bad guy.
[1] I address this aspect of money, and other aspects that affect inflation, in my book What’s Wrong With Money: The Biggest Bubble of All.
Twits and Brits
I want to talk today about some of the really important pieces of information that circulated this weekend. First, I am certain that everyone is familiar with the following chart, which made the rounds after the Brexit vote. It shows an enormous surge in the search term “What is the EU” after the Brexit vote was completed:
This chart, or something very much like it, was all over the place. Oh, wait! I just realized that I forgot to put the axes on the chart! Here it is with a few more relevant pieces of information – incidentally the same information that was left off the original chart. It turns out that it wasn’t the chart I thought it was. Sorry about that…they looked the same.
(For the record, after an extended period of indolence, on Thursday I went for a run; on Friday I went for a run before putting on any other shoes first; on Saturday I went for a run and then later put on different shoes to go to a cocktail party.)
Is it too much to ask that people seeking to insult the British voters at least put some effort into their attempt? Ignore for a moment the simple fact that we don’t know who was searching this – it might well have been the people who voted to Remain, after all – and so the story line that the people who voted Leave were just morons gets no support from this chart. It also turns out that this was the second-most-searched term only for one small time segment: early in the morning after the vote. By 5am it was eclipsed by questions about the weather. Oh my – it seems the Britons also don’t know what weather is! Also, as the Telegraph’s skeptical story (linked above) points out, the raw number of people asking the question was only on the order of 1,000 – it was just a massive increase since it hadn’t been previously asked very much. This is where not having axes matters…it turns out this is a non-story, and nonsense.
Another piece of nonsense I want to point out is more general. I have seen several Twitter polls and other polls in something like this form:
Q: What effect do you think that Brexit will have on the global economy?
a) Deeply contractionary
b) Moderately contractionary
c) Somewhat contractionary
d) Expansionary
Now this is nonsense because the actual result not only has nothing to do with opinion, it’s not even clear why we would care about people’s opinion in this case (unless we are trying to show how pervasive the negative news stories are, or something). Polls work comparatively well when there is not a lot of information inequality – for example, when each person is asked about his or her own vote. But the poll above is analogous to this poll:
I submit that only me, and my valet, have the information sought by this poll; all other respondents have zero information. Therefore…what’s the value of the poll? Unless I or my valet are respondents, precisely zero; if we are, then the value is inverse to the number of other respondents diluting the response of the people who know.
Similarly, there is likely some information asymmetry among respondents to the poll about the effect of Brexit on the global economy. I would respectfully suggest that most people who are responding are saying what they have heard, or what they fear, or what they hope, while some people – macroeconomists, for example – might have actual models. To be sure, those models are probably only slightly better than the fearful and hopeful assumptions put into them, but the point is that this poll is nonsense in the same way that polling people about what they expect inflation next year to be is nonsense. The vast majority of respondents have no way to evaluate the question in a structured way, so what you are capturing is no more and no less than what people are worried about, which is itself just a reflection of what they’re seeing and hearing…for example, on Twitter.
(For what it’s worth, I think that thanks to the weakening of sterling Brexit is likely to be mildly stimulative to the UK economy, as well as somewhat inflationary, and slightly contractionary and disinflationary to the rest of the world. But the question about global effects is a trick question. Obviously, global production and consumption are unlikely to change much in real terms just due to the arrangement of trade flows. More friction in the system to the extent that Europe puts up significant trade barriers against the UK – something I don’t view as terribly likely – will lower global output slightly and raise global prices.)
These flash polls and Google trends data are part and parcel of the Twitterization of discourse. They have in common the fact that they can be snapshot and draw eyeballs and clicks, whether or not there is any content to the observations. In these cases, and in many others, there isn’t.
Here’s a thought: why don’t we wait a few months, or better yet a few years, before we judge the impact of Brexit? Sometimes, having actual data is even better than a Twitter poll.
Britain Survived the Blitz and Will Survive Brexit
So I see today that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan says this is the worst crisis he has seen. Bigger than the 1987 Crash? Bigger than Long Term Capital? Bigger than the internet bubble collapse? Bigger than the Lehman (et. al.) collapse? Really?
As humans, we tend to have short memories and (ridiculously) short planning horizons. Greenspan, especially in his apparent dotage, has a shorter memory even than he had previously – maybe this is convenient given his record. I don’t want to comment on his planning horizon as that would seem uncharitable.
Why is Brexit bad? The trade arrangements and treaties do not suddenly become invalid simply because the UK has voted to throw off the shackles of her overlords and return to being governed by the same rules they’ve been governed by basically since the Magna Carta. But Jim Bianco crystallized the issue for me this week. He pointed out that while Brussels could let this be a mostly painless transition, it has every incentive to make it as painful as possible. In Jim’s words, “if it isn’t painful then hands shoot up all over Europe to be the next to leave.” That’s an astute political observation, and I think he’s right. The EU will work hard to punish Britain for having the temerity to demand sovereignty.
But Britain survived the Blitz; they will survive Brexit.
Indeed, Britain will survive longer than the Euro. The sun is beginning to set on that experiment. The first cracks happened a few years ago with Greece, but the implausibility of a union of political and economic interests when the national interests diverge was a problem from the first Maastricht vote. Who is next? Will it be Greece, Spain, Italy, or maybe France where the anti-EU sentiment is higher even than it is in the UK? The only questions now are the timing of the exits (is it months, or years?) and the order of the exits.
As I said, as humans we not only have short memories but short planning horizons. From a horizon of 5 or 10 years, is it going to turn out that Brexit was a total disaster, leading to a drastically different standard of living in the UK? I can’t imagine that is the case – the 2008 crisis has had an effect on lifestyles, but only because of the scale and scope of central bank policy errors. In Iceland, which addressed the imbalances head-on, life recovered surprisingly quickly.
These are all political questions. The financial questions are in some sense more fascinating, and moreover feed our tendency to focus on the short term.
A lot of money was wagered over the last few weeks on what was a 52-48 proposition the whole way. The betting markets were skewed because of assumptions about how undecideds would break, but it was never far from a tossup in actual polling (and now perhaps we will return to taking polling with the grain of salt it is usually served with). Markets are reacting modestly violently today – at this writing, the US stock market is only -2.5% or so, which is hardly a calamity, but bourses in Europe are in considerably worse shape of course – and this should maybe be surprising with a 52-48 outcome. I like to use the Kelly Criterion framework as a useful way to think about how much to tilt investments given a particular set of circumstances.
Kelly says that your bet size should depend on your edge (the chance of winning) and your odds (the payoff, given success or failure). Going into this vote, betting on Remain had a narrow edge (52-48) and awful odds (if Remain won, the payoff was pretty small since it was mostly priced in). Kelly would say this means you should have a very small bet on, if you want to bet that outcome. If you want to bet the Leave outcome, your edge was negative but your odds were much better, so perhaps somewhat larger of a bet on Brexit than on Bremain was warranted. But that’s not the way the money flowed, evidently.
Not to worry: this morning Janet Yellen said (with the market down 2.5%) that the Fed stood ready to add liquidity if needed. After 2.5%? In 1995 she would have had to come out and say that every week or two. A 2.5% decline takes us back to last week’s lows. Oh, the humanity!
Just stop. The purpose of markets is to move risk from people who have it to people who want it. If, all of a sudden, lots of people seem to have too much risk and to want less, then perhaps it is because they were encouraged into taking too much risk, or encouraged to think of the risk as being less than it was. I wonder how that happened? Oh, right: that’s what the Fed called the “portfolio balance channel” – by removing less-risky assets, they forced investors to hold more-risky assets since those assets now constitute a larger portion of the float. In my opinion (and this will not happen soon), central banks might consider letting markets allocate risk between the people who want it and the people who don’t want it, at fair prices. Just a suggestion.
One final point to be made today. I have seen people draw comparisons between this episode and other historical episodes. This is refreshing, since it reflects at least some thoughtful attempt to remember history. Not all of these are apt or useful comparisons; I saw one that this is the “Archduke Ferdinand” moment of this generation and that’s just nuts. Europe is not a military powderkeg at the moment and war in Europe is not about to begin. But, to the extent that trade barriers begin to rise again, the idea that this may be a “Smoot-Hawley” moment is worth consideration. The Smoot-Hawley tariff is generally thought to have added the “Great” to the phrase “Great Depression.” I think that’s probably overstating the importance of this event – especially if everybody decides to respect Britons’ decision and try to continue trade as usual – but it’s the right idea. What I want to point out is that while rising tariffs tend to produce lower growth and lower potential growth, they also tend to produce higher inflation. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of Eastern Europe is one big reason that inflation outcomes over the last few decades have been lower than we would have expected for the amount of money growth we have had. The US has gone from producing all of its own apparel to producing almost none, for example, and this is a disinflationary influence. What would happen to apparel prices if the US changed its mind and started producing it all domestically again? Give that some thought, and realize that’s the protectionist part of the Brexit argument.
We can cheer for a victory for independence and freedom, while continuing to fight against any tendency towards economic isolationism. But I worry about the latter. It will mean higher inflation going forward, even if the doomsayers are right and we also get lower growth from Brexit and the knock-on effects of Brexit.
The Destination Currency in the Global Carry Trade: USD?
If you are an investor of the Ben Graham school, you’ve lived your life looking for “value” investments with a “margin of safety.” Periodically, if you are a pure value investor, then you go through long periods of pulling your hair out when momentum rules the day, even if you believe – as GMO’s Ben Inker eloquently stated in last month’s letter – that in the long run, no factor is as important to investment returns as valuation.
This is one of those times. Stocks have been egregiously overvalued (using the Shiller CAPE, or Tobin’s Q, or any of a dozen other traditional value metrics) for a very long time now. Ten-year Treasuries are at 1.80% in an environment where median inflation is at 2.5% and rising, and where the Fed’s target for inflation is above the long-term nominal yield. TIPS yields are significantly better, but 10-year real yields at 0.23% won’t make you rich. Commodities are very cheap, but that’s just a bubble in the other direction. The bottom line is that the last few years have not been a great time to be purely a value investor. The value investor laments “why?”, and tries to incorporate some momentum metrics into his or her approach, to at least avoid the value traps.
Well, here is one reason why: the US is the destination currency in the global carry trade.
A “carry trade” is one in which regular returns can be earned simply on the difference in yields between different instruments. If I can borrow at LIBOR flat and lend at LIBOR+2%, I am in a carry trade. Carry trades that are riskless and result from one’s market position (e.g., if I am a bank and I can borrow from 5-year CD customers at 0.5% and invest in 5-year Treasuries at 1.35%) are usually more like accrual trades, and are not what we are talking about here. We are talking about positions that imply some risk, even if it is believed to be small. For example, because we are pretty sure that the Fed will not tighten aggressively any time soon, we could simply buy 2-year Treasuries at 0.88% and borrow the money in overnight repo markets at 0.40% and earn 48bps per year for two years. This will work unless overnight interest rates rise appreciably above 88bps.
We all know that carry trades can be terribly dangerous. Carry trades are implicit short-option bets where you make a little money a lot of the time, and then get run over with some (unknown) frequency and lose a lot of money occasionally. But they are seductive bets since we all like to think we will see the train coming and leap free just in time. There’s a reason these bets exist – someone wants the other side, after all.
Carry trades in currency-land are some of the most common and most curious of all. If I borrow money for three years in Japan and lend it in Brazil, then I expect to make a huge interest spread. Of course, though, this is entirely reflected in the 3-year forward rate between yen and real, which is set precisely in this way (covered-interest arbitrage, it is called). So, to make money on the Yen/Real carry bet, you need to carry the trade and reverse the exchange rate bet at the end. If the Real has appreciated, or has been stable, or has declined only a little, then you “won” the carry trade. But all you really did was bet against the forward exchange rate. Still, lots and lots of investors make precisely this sort of bet: borrowing money is low-interest rate currencies, investing in high-interest-rate currencies, and betting that the latter currency will at least not decline very much.
How does this get back to the value question?
Over the last several years, the US interest rate advantage relative to Europe and Japan has grown. This should mean that the dollar is expected to weaken going forward, so that someone who borrows in Euro to invest in the US ought to expect to lose on the future exchange rate when they cash out their dollars. And indeed, as the interest rate advantage has widened so has the steepness of the forward points curve that expresses this relationship. But, because investors like to go to higher-yielding currencies, the dollar in fact has strengthened.
This flow is a lot like what happens to people on a ship that has foundered on rocks. Someone lowers a lifeboat, which looks like a great deal. So people begin to pour into the lifeboat, and they keep doing so until it ceases, suddenly, to be a good deal. Then all of those people start to wish they had stayed on the ship and waited for help.
In any event, back to value: the chart below (source: Bloomberg) shows the difference between the 10-year US$ Libor swap rate minus the 10-year Euribor swap rate, in white and plotted in percentage terms on the right-hand scale. The yellow line is the S&P 500, and is plotted on the left-hand scale. Notice anything interesting?
The next chart shows a longer time scale. You can see that this is not a phenomenon unique to the last few years.
Yes, the correlation isn’t perfect but to me, it’s striking. And we can probably do better. After all, the chart above is just showing the level of equity prices, not whether they are overvalued or undervalued, and my thesis is that the fact that the US is the high-yielding currency in the carry trade causes the angst for value investors. We can show this by looking at the interest rate spread as above, but this time against a measure of valuation. I’ve chosen, for simplicity, the Shiller Cyclically-Adjusted P/E (CAPE) (Source: http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm)
Now, I should take pains to point out that I have not proven any causality here. It may turn out, in fact, that the causality runs the other way: overheated markets lead to tight US monetary policy that causes the interest rate spread to widen. I am skeptical of that, because I can’t recall many episodes in the last couple of decades where frothy markets led to tight monetary policy, but the point is that this chart is only suggestive of a relationship, not indicative of it. Still, it is highly suggestive!
The implication, if there is a causal relationship here, is interesting. It suggests that we need not fear these levels of valuation, as long as interest rates continue to suggest that the US is a good place to keep your money (that is, as long as you aren’t afraid of the dollar weakening). That, in turn, suggests that we ought to keep an eye on rates of change: if the ECB tightens more, or eases less, than is priced into European markets (which seems unlikely), or the Fed tightens less, or eases more, than is priced into US markets (which seems more likely, but not super likely since not much is presently priced in), or the dollar trend changes clearly. When one of those things happens, it will be a sign that not only are the future returns to equities looking unrewarding, but the more immediate returns as well.
Roller Skating in a Buffalo Herd
The ECB fired its “bazooka” today, cutting official rates more into negative territory, increasing QE by another €20bln per month, expanding the range of assets the central bank can buy to now include corporate bonds, and creating a new 4-year program whereby the ECB will loan long-term money to banks at rates that could be negative (based on bank credit extended to corporate and personal borrowers).
My point today is not to opine on the power or wisdom of these policy moves. The main thing I want to observe is this: the inflation market is pricing in what amounts to success for global central banks, with consumer inflation averaging something between 1 and 2 percent per year for the next decade (a bit lower in Japan; a bit higher in the UK). Not only are inflation swaps prices much lower than would be expected from a pure monetarists’ standpoint – but options prices are also very low. The chart below (source: Enduring Investments) shows normalized volatilities[1] over the last five years for a 10-year, 2% year-over-year inflation cap. That is, every year you take a look and see if inflation was over 2%. If it was, then the owner of this option is paid the difference between actual inflation and 2%; if it was not, the owner gets zero. So you get to look ten times at whether inflation has gotten above 2%, and get paid each time it has.
The chart shows that whatever inflation is expected to be, the price to cover the risk that inflation is actually somewhat higher is very low. So, not only is inflation expected to be low, but it is expected to be not volatile either.
Look, we’re talking about bazookas, helicopters…does something not seem right about pricing in very little risk of screwing up?
Whether you believe my thesis in my freshly-released book What’s Wrong With Money?[2] that the likely course of inflation over the next few years is higher and potentially much higher, or you agree with those who think deflation is imminent, shouldn’t we agree that bazookas introduce volatility?
Central banks are attempting to do something that has never been done. Shouldn’t we at least be a teensy bit nervous, as they line up to perform the first-ever quintuple-lutz, that no one has ever landed one before? That no one has ever landed a commercial passenger jet on an aircraft carrier?
Uncertainty is supposed to lower asset values, all else being equal. So even if you think stocks at these levels are “fair,” in an environment with earnings and interest rates where they are now and projected earnings following a certain path, an increase in the volatility of those outcomes should lower the clearing price of those assets since the buyer of the asset (which has positive value) is also assuming the volatility (which has a negative value).
But the market also says that uncertainty right now is low. Yes, the VIX is well off its lows and seems to suggest greater short-term uncertainty (see chart below, source Bloomberg) – but I would argue that the long-term volatility of the economic fundamentals has rarely been this high.
Supposedly you can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd,[3] but we also have never tried to do it. There’s a reason we haven’t tried to do it!
But the Fed, and the rest of the world’s central banks, are not only roller skating in a buffalo herd – the world’s markets seem to be suggesting that investors are sure they’re going to succeed. Regardless of whether you’re optimistic about the outcome, I would argue it’s nearly impossible to be both optimistic and highly confident!
[1] This means something to options traders but can be glossed over by non-options traders. Essentially the point is that you can’t use a regular Black-Scholes model to price options if the strike and/or the forward can have a negative value!
[2] #1 on Amazon in “Economic Inflation,” thanks largely to all of you!
