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Is Inflation Dead…Again?

May 31, 2023 2 comments

I am not the first person to point out that the stock market, at outlandish multiples, is not behaving consistently with commodities markets that are flashing imminent depression. If we insist on anthropomorphizing the markets, it really makes no sense at all unless we posit that “the market” suffers from a split personality disorder of some kind. But that sort of thing happens all the time, in little ways.

But here is something that seems very weird to me. Prices of short-dated inflation swaps in the interbank market suggest that NSA headline inflation is going to rise less than 0.9% for the entire balance of 2023 (a 1.45% annualized rate). And actually, most of that rise will be in the next 2 months. The market is pricing that between June’s CPI print and December’s CPI print the overall price level will rise 0.23%…less than ½% annualized!

Now, eagle-eyed readers will notice that there was also a flat portion of 2022, covering roughly the same period. Headline inflation between June and December last year rose only 0.16%, leading to disappointing coupons on iBonds and producing proclamations that inflation was nearly beaten. Here’s the thing, though. The second half of 2022 it made perfect sense that headline inflation was mostly unchanged. Oil prices dropped from $120/bbl the first week of June, to $75 by mid-December. Nationwide, average unleaded gasoline prices dropped from $5 to $3.25 during that time period.

A comparable percentage decline would mean that gasoline would need to drop to $2.32 from the current $3.58 average price at the pump. To be sure, the gasoline futures market is in much steeper backwardation than normal, with about 44c in the curve from now until December compared with 28c from June to December 2024.[1] So that can’t be the whole source of this insouciance about inflation. If gasoline does decline that much, the inflation curve will be right…but there’s an easier way to trade that, and that’s to sell Nov or Dec RBOB gasoline futures.

So the flatness must be coming from elsewhere. It can’t be from piped gas, which has recently been a measurable lag, because Natural Gas prices have already crashed back to levels somewhat below the norm of the last 10 years. Prices of foodstuffs could fall back more, which would help food-at-home if it happened, but food-away-from-home tracks wages so it’s hard to get this huge of an effect from food.

Ergo…this really must be core. Except there, the only market where you can sort of trade core inflation rather than backing into it, the Kalshi exchange, has the current prices of m/m core at 0.35% in May, 0.32% in June, 0.57% in July, 0.45% in August, 0.35% in September, 0.18% in October, and 0.22% in November. (To be sure, those markets especially for later months are still fairly illiquid but getting better). That’s not drastically different from the 0.41% average over the last six months.

Markets, of course, trade where risk clears and not necessarily where “the market thinks” the price should be. I find it hard to understand though who it is who would have such an exposure to lower short-term prices that they would need to aggressively sell short-term inflation…unless it is large institutional owners of TIPS who are making a tactical view that near-term prints would be bad. Sure seems like a big punt, if so.

Naturally, it’s possible that inflation will suddenly flatline from here. I just don’t feel like that’s the ‘fair bet’. That is after all a key function of markets: offer attractive bets to people who don’t have a natural bias in the market in question, to offset the flows of those people who are willing to pay to reduce their risk in a particular direction. (This should not be taken to suggest that I don’t have a natural bias in the market; I do.)

There’s another reason that this matters right now. Recently, markets have also been starting to price the possibility that the Federal Reserve could continue to hike interest rates, despite fairly clear signals from the Chairman after the last meeting that a ‘pause’ was in the offing. That certainly makes sense to me, since 25bps or 50bps makes almost no difference and after one of the most-aggressive hiking cycles in history, putting rates at approximately long-term neutral at the short end, it would seem to be prudent to at least look around. If, in looking around, the Fed were to notice that the balance of the market is suggesting that inflation has a chance of going instantly and completely inert, it would seem to be even stranger to think that the FOMC is about to fire up the rate-hike machine again for another few hikes.


[1] N.b. – June to December on the futures curve isn’t the exact right comparison since prices at the pump lag wholesale futures prices, but it gives you an idea.

Food Inflation Served Hot and Cold

Well, the Fed is done raising interest rates. They aren’t quite done tightening yet, because the Federal Reserve is going to continue to shrink its balance sheet slowly. That’s important. The fact that the Fed is no longer hiking rates, but is continuing to normalize its balance sheet, is quietly impressive to me. It makes me wonder whether someone at the Fed understands that saturating the economy with bank reserves means that today’s tightening is fundamentally different from the tightening of yesteryear, which was a money phenomenon and not a rates phenomenon.

We may never know, but I do have to admit that Chairman Powell impressed me a little in his post-FOMC presser. Not impressed me like ‘he’s the greatest’ but impressed me like ‘this is what I’d hoped we were getting.’ I wrote back in 2017 that the fact he is not an economics PhD was a positive…although the fact that he did not know anything about macroeconomics before joining the Fed suggested that he has learned economics in an echo chamber from some of the most blinkered non-monetarists on the planet, whose main claim to fame is that their forecasts have been consistently, and sometimes colossally, wrong for a long period of time. Still, he has a different background and that always offers hope.

The conduct of monetary policy under Powell has certainly been different than it was under his predecessors. We have to give him that! In any event, he said several things that impressed me because they surprised me. I’ll have more details and specifics in our Quarterly Inflation Outlook released a few days after CPI this month (you can subscribe at https://inflationguy.blog/shop/ ).

But today, I’m here to talk about food inflation. Normally, food inflation along with energy is deducted from the CPI to produce Core CPI, which is more stable and therefore should give better signals with less noise as long as food and energy inflation are mostly mean-reverting. And normally, they are. Energy is famously mean-reverting; the nationwide average price of a gallon of gasoline right now is $3.574, which is down 5 cents from…April 2008. There is a lot of noise and not much signal, so it makes sense to deduct.

Similarly, food inflation has a large commodity component and is also very volatile. It is not as volatile as is energy, partly because we don’t consume most of the foods that we buy in pure commodity form but rather in a packaged form; also foodstuffs are much more heterogeneous than gasoline and so branding matters a lot. Still, the food component of CPI is pretty volatile and normally fairly mean reverting although unlike energy it definitely has an upward tilt over time.

For some time now, though, food prices have been consistently adding to overall inflation. In mid-2021, trailing 12-month CPI for the “Food” subindex was about 2%; by late 2022 that was up to 11%! Recently, though, Food has started to come back to earth a little bit. The reason why is interesting and illuminating.

“Food,” which is 13.5% of the CPI, has two primary subgroups. “Food at home” is 8.7% of the CPI (about 2/3 of “Food”) and “Food away from home” is 4.8% of the CPI. The recent deceleration in the Food category has come entirely from “Food at home” (see chart, source BLS). That group got to about 14% y/y inflation, but most recently has fallen to a mere 8%. The steadier “Food away from home” is still plugging away, last at 8.8% y/y…a new high, actually.

As you might expect, while “Food at home” does not directly track, say, wholesale cattle or wheat prices, persistent changes in commodities prices does eventually percolate into pricing. The following chart shows a very simple relationship between “Food at home” and the Bloomberg Commodity Index “Agriculture” subindex (which tracks the performance of coffee, corn, wheat, beans, bean oil, cattle, hogs, cotton, and sugar. Aside from cotton, that list comprises a good part of what Americans buy to eat at home. So it isn’t terribly surprising that, at least for large movements in prices, these things eventually show up in the prices of things we buy. In this chart, the commodity index is lagged 12 months and shown on the right-hand scale. As an aside, consider how little of the price of what we buy must represent the actual commodity cost, if a 60% rise in commodities prices only results in a 14% increase in the price of Food at home, a full year later!

That chart says that “Food at home” should continue to decelerate and be a gentle drag for another year. On the other hand, “Food away from home” has completely different drivers that aren’t related to commodities prices hardly at all.

In contrast to the prior observation, consider how much of “Food away from home” must be labor, if the correlation between labor inflation and “Food away from home” is so high and of such a similar scale. Of course, we know that to be the case: the labor shortage hit the restaurant industry very hard and those effects are still being felt. There is not yet any sign of a decline in wage growth among these workers, and consequently there is not any sign of a deceleration in inflation of “Food away from home.” It should continue to be additive to CPI for a while.

The dichotomy between these two parts of the “Food” category is, of course, exactly what concerns the Federal Reserve and other economists who examine inflation. I’ve written about it here (and spoken about it on my podcast) a bunch of times: core services ex housing is where the wage-price feedback loop lives. It’s where the persistence of inflation comes from, and that is why it is the Fed’s main focus. Although I was writing about this before the Fed ever mentioned it, I have to give them credit – I thought they would seize on the fact that energy prices are pulling down overall inflation, or that rents may be decelerating soon, and use that as an excuse to take their usual dovish turn. They have not. The Fed actually seems to be focused on the right thing.

Maybe Powell is different, after all.

Who’s Afraid of De-Dollarization?

April 19, 2023 3 comments

Do we need to worry about the end of dollar dominance in international trade – the de-dollarization of global finance?

I am hoping to do a podcast on this topic in a few weeks, featuring a guest who is actually an expert on foreign exchange and who can push back on my thought processes (or, less likely, echo them) – but the topic seems timely now. There is widespread discussion and concern in some quarters, as China and Russia push forward efforts to establish the Chinese Yuan as an alternative currency for international trade settlement, that this could spell the sunset of the dollar’s dominance. Some of the more animated commentators declare that de-dollarization will dramatically and immediately eviscerate the standard of living in the United States and condemn the nation to be an also-ran third-rate economy as its citizens descend into unspeakable squalor.

Obviously, such ghoulish prognostications are ridiculously overdone for the purpose of generating clicks. But how much of it is true, at least on some level? What would happen if, tomorrow, the US dollar lost its status as the world’s primary reserve currency?

One thing that wouldn’t change at all is the quantity of dollars in circulation. That’s a number that the Federal Reserve exerts some control over (they used to have almost total control, when banks were reserve-constrained; now that banks have far more reserves than they need, they can lend as much as they like, creating as many floating dollars as they like, constrained only by their balance sheet). The holders of dollars have absolutely no control over the amount of them in circulation! If Party A doesn’t like owning dollars, they can sell their dollars – but they have to sell it to some Party B, who then holds the dollars.

What also wouldn’t change immediately is how many dollar reserves every country holds. From time to time, people get concerned that “China is going to sell all of its dollars.” But China got those dollars because they sell us more stuff than we sell them, which causes them to accumulate dollars over time. How can China get rid of their dollars? Their options are fairly limited:

  1. They can start buying more from us than they sell to us. We’ve been trying to get them to do this for years! Seems unlikely.
  2. They can buy from us, stuff priced in dollars, but only sell goods to us that are priced in Yuan. To get Yuan, a US purchaser would have to sell dollars to buy Yuan. Since China doesn’t want to be the other side of that trade (which would leave them with the same amount of dollars), the US purchaser would have to go elsewhere to buy Yuan. This would strengthen the Yuan. This is also something we’ve been trying to get them to do for years! The Bank of China stops the Yuan from strengthening against the dollar by…selling Yuan and buying dollars. Hmmm.
  3. They can just hit the bid and sell dollars against all sorts of other currencies. This would greatly weaken the dollar, and is perhaps the biggest fear of many of the people worried about de-dollarization.

Supposing that China decided on #3, they would be making US industry much more competitive around the world against all of the currencies that China was buying. Foreign buyers of US products would now be able to buy US goods much more cheaply. It would cause more inflation in the US, but it would take a large dollar decline to drastically increase US inflation since foreign trade is a smaller part of the US economy than it is for many other countries.

A much lower dollar, making US prices look lower to non-US customers, would help balance the US trade deficit. Yay!

A tendency towards balance of the trade deficit would have ancillary impacts. When the US government runs a fiscal deficit, it borrows from essentially two places: domestic savers and foreign savers. Foreigners, having a surplus of dollars (since they have trade surpluses with us), buy Treasuries among other things. If the trade deficit went down drastically, so would foreign demand for US Treasuries. That in turn would (unless the government started to balance its fiscal deficit) cause higher interest rates, which would be necessary to induce domestic savers to buy more Treasuries. Or, if domestic savers were not up to the task, the buyer of last resort would be…the Federal Reserve, which could buy those bonds with printed money. And that’s a really bad outcome.

Now, does any of this cause a collapse of the American system or spell an end to US hegemony? No. If policymakers respond to such an event by refusing to get the fiscal house in order, then things could get ugly. But it would be hard to blame that outcome on the end of the dollar as the medium of international trade – blame would more appropriately be directed at the failure of domestic policymakers to adjust in response.

In the end, it is hard to escape the idea that good or bad economic and inflation outcomes in the United States track mainly, one way or the other, back to domestic policy decisions. Whether the US economic system remains a dominant one is…fortunately or unfortunately…in our hands, not in the hands of foreign state actors.

Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets (March 2023)

Below is a summary of my post-CPI tweets. You can (and should!) follow me @inflation_guy, but subscribers to @InflGuyPlus get the tweets in real time and a conference call wrapping it all up by about the time the stock market opens. Subscribe by going to the shop at https://inflationguy.blog/shop/ , where you can also subscribe to the Enduring Investments Quarterly Inflation Outlook. Sign up for email updates to my occasional articles here. Individual and institutional investors, issuers and risk managers with interests in this area be sure to stop by Enduring Investments! Check out the Inflation Guy podcast!

Note that since the post-8:30am charts were tweeted rapidly and commentary added to it by later re-tweets, the summary below is rearranged to eliminate the redundancy and improve readability.

  • Welcome to the #CPI #inflation walkup for April! (March’s CPI figure)
  • A reminder to subscribers of the tweet schedule: At 8:30ET, when the data drops, I will post a number of charts and numbers, in fairly rapid-fire succession. Then I will retweet some of those charts with comments attached. Then I’ll run some other charts.
  • There is a small wrinkle this month: I am going to be a guest on a Twitter space hosted by @Unusual_Whales while I’m busy tweeting. That shouldn’t impact you subscribers. Tune in if you want!
  • After the tweeting dies down, I will have a private conference call for subscribers where I’ll quickly summarize the numbers. After my comments on the number, I will post a partial summary at https://inflationguy.blog and later will podcast a summary at inflationguy.podbean.com .
  • I will also record that call for later call-in if you’re not available (and of course later there will be my tweet summary, and my podcast, so you can consume my opinions however suits you).
  • Thanks again for subscribing! And now for the walkup.(Some of this I’ve related over the last few days and am summarizing/repeating here.)
  • The whole banking-collapse thing seems to have blown over for now, but interest rates are still lower than they were a month ago. And breakevens are higher. This is one reason stocks are doing well – steady infl expectations and lower real yields is a sweet cocktail for equities.
  • It’s also likely fleeting, but it helps explain why the market is doing so well for now.
  • Today’s CPI print might be very interesting. There are a lot of crosscurrents and everyone seems to be interpreting them differently. The spread isn’t super wide, but the swaps market is almost a full 0.1% below economists’ estimate for headline inflation.
  • (The swaps market tends to be more accurate than economists in this regard, but I hope this month they aren’t because I have the over.)
  • The drag on inflation is not going to come from food; raw foods are again spiking and there’s still the wage issues for food-away-from-home. I have gasoline adding 3bps, while some others see it flat or subtracting slightly. But the big drag is piped gas.
  • As I noted on Monday, piped gas is part of household energy and normally it is too small to matter. But the massive recent decline pulled down February CPI and should pull down March. I have the effect worth 13bps.
  • But also, lower utilities implies that primary rents will have a small tailwind UPWARD and most people will ignore that. The reason it happens is the BLS backs out utilities when rents include utilities, so sharply lower utilities implies slightly higher rents.
  • Anyway, that’s the big drag. But why does the swap market see it as so much bigger than economists do? That’s odd. Or it could imply the Street sees a real drag on core…but that’s a hard sell right now.
  • Last month, Used Cars did not rise along with the private indices, but those indices rose again and so it’s likely we’ve seen the end of the price retracement from Used Cars. Indeed, Core Goods is showing signs that it is not going to gently go to -1%.
  • Heck, in my view the economists are too low on core anyway – they’re 0.05% below the traders on Kalshi’s core inflation market, and 0.1% below me. Is it possible we can get 0.4% or lower on core? Sure. But there are a lot of upward pressures.
  • This chart shows median wages minus median CPI. For years, it has been stable at about 1%, other than in the aftermath of disaster. Right now it isn’t, b/c Median CPI is still rising while median wages have ebbed although just a little.
  • Now, this chart might say something different to you than to me. My interpretation is that employees will fight against further declines in wage growth, until inflation comes down. But you might argue that this gives room for CPI to decelerate.
  • Since we are focused on the wage-price feedback loop in core-services-ex-shelter (as I was saying long before the cool kids dubbed it “supercore”), the resolution of this question is very, very important.
  • Anyway, I think we will see 0.5% on core inflation. But even if we only see 0.4%, y/y core will rise. Not many will get too exercised about that, though, because the easy comps are coming. By May, we will likely see y/y core start declining again.
  • Of course, I’m focused on median CPI, which is still hitting new highs. But it also should start ebbing soon. As always, the question is “how much” and I continue to say “not as much as the market is pricing in.” With breakevens in the low 2s, they’re very cheap in my view.
  • We will see what the number brings. But unless it’s even higher than I have it, and with an alarming breadth, I think the Fed is likely done hiking. As I said last month, 25bps doesn’t do anything at this stage anyway.
  • But +0.5% on core will be taken very badly by the stock market, I think, and probably pretty bad for bonds as well. Everyone wants fervently to believe with the inflation swaps market that this inflation episode is over.
  • Doesn’t look like it to me. Not yet! Good luck today and I’ll be back live at 8:31ET.

  • Definitely better than expected. Swap market as usual is closer than economists…and core was actually was .053%
  • m/m CPI: 0.053% m/m Core CPI: 0.385%
  • Kneejerk observations: Used Cars dragged again (?). RENTS WERE SHARPLY LOWER FROM TREND. Medical Care was a drag.
  • Last 12 core CPI figures
  • Inflation Swap market gets closest-to-the-pin. In fact, Headline rounded UP to 0.1%. Core was actually kinda close to expectations (but lower than I thought!).
  • M/M, Y/Y, and prior Y/Y for 8 major subgroups
  • The big story here is going to be housing. Housing 0.3% m/m is a big decline. Some of that is piped gas, but…
  • Core Goods: 1.53% y/y                       Core Services: 7.13% y/y
  • Now, notice that core goods turned up. That’s even though CPI for Used Cars declined. Again, that is unexpected since private surveys have said used car prices are going back up.
  • Primary Rents: 8.81% y/y                    OER: 8.04% y/y
  • …still not peaked, but peaking? Actually y/y higher this month, so it’s possible there’s some seasonality issue.
  • Further: Primary Rents 0.49% M/M, 8.81% Y/Y (8.76% last)         OER 0.48% M/M, 8.04% Y/Y (8.01% last)         Lodging Away From Home 2.7% M/M, 7.3% Y/Y (6.7% last)
  • (This really is the big story today. Actually, core being that high despite housing…is surprising.)
  • Actually core ex-shelter rose very slightly to 3.81% y/y.
  • Here is my early and automated guess at Median CPI for this month: 0.401%
  • Some ‘COVID’ Categories: Airfares 3.96% M/M (6.38% Last)          Lodging Away from Home 2.7% M/M (2.26% Last)          Used Cars/Trucks -0.88% M/M (-2.77% Last)          New Cars/Trucks 0.38% M/M (0.18% Last)
  • Piece 1: Food & Energy: 2.63% y/y
  • A lot of the recent plunge here is piped gas…which is just about done.
  • Piece 2: Core Commodities: 1.53% y/y
  • Piece 3: Core Services less Rent of Shelter: 5.53% y/y
  • Supercore coming down! But just a little. Still not sure this is thrilling enough for the Fed.
  • Piece 4: Rent of Shelter: 8.26% y/y
  • The distribution here is going to be really important. Unfortunately my data scraper is having a strange issue and that feeds my distribution stuff. Obviously the middle shifted, which is why median CPI decelerated, but I want to see the diffusion stuff. Tech delay for me…
  • Piped gas actually fell only -8.0% m/m NSA, versus -9.3% last month. I thought it was going to be greater, so there was a slightly SMALLER drag on headline than I expected there.
  • Also encouraging is that Food and Beverages was only 0.02% m/m. I’m a little surprised by that, but it’s good news. Non-core of course.
  • I will say the bottom line is that IF the housing data is real, then this is a really happy inflation number. But outside of the housing data…core was still 0.4%! So not GREAT data. The distribution data will be important, which is why it’s even more frustrating atm.
  • I can also report that the biggest decliners in core m/m were Car/Truck Rental (-37% annualized monthly change), Energy Services (-24%), Misc Personal Goods (-14%) and Used Cars/Trucks (-10%). Latter I’ve already mentioned is really odd.
  • Biggest gainers are Public Transportation (+46%), Lodging Away from Home (+38%), Motor Vehicle Insurance (+16%), Mens/Boys Apparel (+13%), and Personal Care Products (+10%).
  • We are obviously not going to have the conference call today…too late to be of any use. But I have some thoughts anyway about the Fed and the positive market reaction.
  • Totally understand the positive market reaction. The headline figure ALMOST rounded to unchanged, and core was a little light although not very much. The rally makes sense.
  • The dive in longer-term breakevens doesn’t, as much. If you think this big deceleration in shelter is real then it means inflation is probably peaking even in a median sense…but long-term breakevens already impound a 2.2% average inflation rate.
  • There is nothing to make me think that rents are going to go flat, with median wages rising at 6% and home prices advancing again. This is not 2009-10 and there is still a big shortage in shelter and plenty of income to support rents. So 2%…is still very unlikely IMO.
  • That said, let’s think about the Fed. Start from the premise that their model is assuming high-frequency rent data is predictive, even though it’s been predicting rent deceleration for a long time and this is the first sign of it.
  • But if your null is “I’m waiting for rental inflation to turn” and then you see a sign of a turn…well, it’s bad econometrics to “confirm” a hypothesis but that’s how humans work. I think this makes a further hike fairly unlikely unless the Fed wants to make a symbolic gesture.
  • With Fed funds at 5% and at least SOME concerns about banking, the juice doesn’t seem to be worth the squeeze to hike again. Which is, of course, why markets are ebullient today.
  • I don’t think we’re out of the woods on inflation yet. I should have missed this number by a LOT more than I did given I was 0.25% off on the largest part of core. It means the strength is still broad.
  • But the question has never been “WILL inflation go back down someday.” It has been about WHEN. And how far…but not so many people are questioning that when it goes back down, it’ll go to 2%.
  • There’s just no natural reason that should happen. It’s a pleasant wish, but there’s no mechanism to cause inflation to go to the Fed’s target naturally. And as I’ve shown recently, there’s actually not much evidence that inflation mean reverts at all…even if the mean IS 2%.
  • So…good news today, and the Fed will take it as such. As will markets. But here is the chart of m/m primary rents. This doesn’t seem entirely plausible to me. Give me another month or two and I’ll be a believer.
  • Anyway, thanks for tuning in, and bearing with me despite the tech issues. I will update the diffusion index when I get the problem fixed.

Today’s inflation data was clearly positive, but how positive it is depends on whether rents are suddenly decelerating in the way the data says they did in March. That seems implausible to me, but it’s possible. As I said above, the question was never whether inflation would stop going up, but when, and how far it falls back. We thought median inflation had peaked in September, and then it went higher. It now looks like it has peaked again – and this is likely the case. But we’ve been fooled before.

Here’s a crucial point to keep in mind, though, when we are predicting Fed action. What’s their null? If my null hypothesis is that inflation is unlikely to slow below 4%, say, then I need a lot more evidence before I stop hiking rates. I know that many of you reading this fall into that camp. But does that mindset characterize the central bank’s thinking? What I think we know about the Fed right now is that they are moderately (but only moderately) concerned about the banking system; they are concerned about core services ex-shelter because of the wage-price feedback loop I’ve been highlighting since long before they did; and they believe that higher-frequency data on rents suggests that rent inflation should be ebbing ‘soon.’ Chairman Powell has said all of these things.

So if that’s the case, how does it frame today’s data?

There’s nothing new in this about banking. But there does seem to be information which would confirm what I am assuming to be the Fed’s ‘priors’ about rents. To me, that one month doesn’t mean a lot, but to someone who has been expecting a deceleration, this probably looks like one. There’s also nothing here about wages per se, although “supercore” is decelerating some. However, I think the Fed already believes wages are declining, because they tend to focus more on “Average Hourly Earnings” from the Employment report. That’s a terrible measure, but it’s widely used. (In fact, for most economic data you want to ignore “average” measures if the composition can change a lot from report to report, like the employment report can). Here’s a chart of AHE, against my preferred measure of median wages of continuously-employed persons, from the Atlanta Fed (in blue).

If I’m right and the Fed is focusing on the black line rather than the blue line, and I’m right about how they are thinking about rents, then I think if you took a poll of Fed thinkers you’d find that most of them think they’ve broken the back of inflation and the only question is how quickly it gets back to 2%. I suspect most of them would prefer to keep rates where they are, and not lower them quickly, because you want to keep the pressure on…but I believe the argument for pushing rates a lot higher is substantially weakened by recent data – that is, if you share those priors.

My view is unchanged, although I will keep an eye on rents. My model has them coming down to 4% or so, but then my model never had them getting much higher than 5%. Some of that is an overshoot thanks to the correction after the eviction moratorium was lifted, but a lot of that in my opinion is supported by the big shortage of shelter and by strong wage growth. I’m not sure why we’d expect rents to fall drastically, especially if a landlord’s cost of financing and of maintenance are still rising. Overall, I think inflation is in retreat thanks to a contracting money supply although that is offset by the rebound in money velocity. But I don’t expect inflation to get to 2% any time this year or in 2024. More likely, we will settle in around 4%-5% later this year. That’s my null hypothesis!

Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets (February 2023)

March 14, 2023 1 comment

Below is a summary of my post-CPI tweets. You can (and should!) follow me @inflation_guy, but subscribers to @InflGuyPlus get the tweets in real time and a conference call wrapping it all up by about the time the stock market opens. Subscribe by going to the shop at https://inflationguy.blog/shop/ , where you can also subscribe to the Enduring Investments Quarterly Inflation Outlook. Sign up for email updates to my occasional articles here. Individual and institutional investors, issuers and risk managers with interests in this area be sure to stop by Enduring Investments! Check out the Inflation Guy podcast!

  • Welcome to the #CPI #inflation walkup! To be sure, the importance of this data point in the short run is much less than it was a week ago, but it would be a mistake to lose sight of inflation now that the Fed is likely moving from QT to QE again.
  • A reminder to subscribers of the tweet schedule: At 8:30ET, when the data drops, I will post a number of charts and numbers, in fairly rapid-fire succession. Then I will retweet some of those charts with comments attached. Then I’ll run some other charts.
  • Afterwards (recently it’s been 9:30ish) I will have a private conference call for subscribers where I’ll quickly summarize the numbers.
  • After my comments on the number, I will post a partial summary at https://inflationguy.blog and later will podcast a summary at inflationguy.podbean.com .
  • I am also going to try and record the conference call for later. I think I’ve figured out how to do that. If I’m successful, I’ll tweet that later also.
  • Thanks again for subscribing! And now for the walkup.
  • This picture of the last month has changed quite a bit over the last few days! Suddenly, rates have reversed and the nominal curve is steepening. The inflation market readings are…of sketchy quality at the moment.
  • Now, the swap market has also re-priced the inflation trough: instead of 2.65% in June (was in low 2s not long ago), the infl swap market now has y/y bottoming at 3.34% b/c of base effects before bouncing to 3.7% & then down to 3.15% by year-end. I think that’s pretty unlikely.
  • Let’s remember that Median CPI reached a new high JUST LAST MONTH, contrary to expectations (including mine). The disturbing inflation trend is what had persuaded investors…until late last week…that the Fed might abruptly lurch back to a 50bp hike.
  • These are real trends…so I’m not sure why economists are acting as if they are still certain that inflation is decelerating. The evidence that it is, so far at least, is sparse.
  • Also, this month not only did the Manheim used car index rise again, but Black Book (historically a better fit although BLS has changed their sampling source so we’re not sure) also did. I have that adding 0.04%-0.05% to core.
  • But maybe this is a good time to step back a bit, because of the diminished importance of this report (to be sure, if we get a clean 0.5%, it’s going to be very problematic for the Fed which means it should also be problematic for equity investors).
  • Over the last few days we’ve read a lot about how banks are seeing deposits leave for higher-yielding opportunities. This is completely expected: as interest rates rise, the demand for real cash balances declines.
  • You may have heard me say that before. But it’s really Friedman who said that first: velocity is the inverse of the demand for real cash balances. DEPOSITS LEAVING FOR HIGHER YIELDS IS EXACTLY WHAT HIGHER VELOCITY MEANS.
  • And it is the reason for the very high correlation of velocity with interest rates.
  • So the backdrop is this: money may be declining slightly but velocity is rebounding hard. Exactly as we should expect. Our model is shown here – it’s heavily influenced by interest rates (but not only interest rates).
  • And if the Fed is going to move from its modest QT to QE, especially if they don’t ALSO slash rates back towards zero, then the inflationary impulse has little reason to fade.
  • You know, I said back when the Fed started hiking that they would stop once the market forced them to. What has been amazing is that there were no accidents until now, so the market let them go for it. And in the long run this is good news – rates nearer neutral.
  • But we have now had some bumps (and to be fair, I said no accidents until now but of course if the FDIC and Fed had been doing their job and monitoring duration gaps…this accident started many many months ago).
  • With respect to how the Fed responds to this number: it is important to remember that the IMPACT ON INFLATION of an incremental 25bps or 50bps is almost zero. Especially in the short run. It might even be precisely zero.
  • But the impact of 25bps or 50bps on attitudes, on deposit flight, and on liquidity hoarding could be severe, in the short run. On the other hand, if the Fed stands pat and does nothing but end QT, it might smack of panic.
  • If I were at the Fed, I’d be deciding between 25bps and 0bps. And the only decent argument for 25bps is that it evinces a “business as usual” air. It won’t affect 2023 inflation at all (even using the Fed’s models which assume rates affect inflation).
  • Here are the forecasts I have for the number – I tweeted this yesterday too. I’m a full 0.1% higher on core than the Street economists, market, and Kalshi. But I’m in-line on headline. So obviously as noted above I see the risks as higher.
  • Market reactions? If we get my number or higher, it creates an obvious dilemma for the Fed and that means bad things for the market no matter how the Fed resolves that. Do they ignore inflation or ignore market stability?
  • If we get lower than the economists’ expectation (on core), then it’s good news for the market because MAYBE it means the Fed isn’t in quite such a bad box and can do more to support liquidity (read: support the mo mo stock guys).
  • So – maybe this report is important after all! Good luck today. I will be back live at 8:31ET.

  • Well, headline was below core!
  • Waiting for database to update but on a glance this doesn’t look good. Core was an upside surprise slightly and that was with used cars a DRAG.
  • m/m CPI: 0.37% m/m Core CPI: 0.452%
  • Last 12 core CPI figures
  • So this to me looks like bad news. I don’t see the deceleration that everyone was looking for. We will look at some of the breakdown in a minute.
  • M/M, Y/Y, and prior Y/Y for 8 major subgroups
  • Standing out a couple of things: Apparel (small weight) jumps again…surprising. And Medical Care is back to a drag…some of that is insurance adjustment (-4.07% m/m, pretty normal) and some is Doctors Services (-0.52% m/m), while Pharma (0.14%) only a small add.
  • Core Goods: 1.03% y/y             Core Services: 7.26% y/y
  • We start to see the problem here: any drag continues to be in core goods. Core goods does not have unlimited downside especially with the USD on the back foot. Core services…no sign of slowing.
  • Primary Rents: 8.76% y/y OER: 8.01% y/y
  • And rents…still accelerating y/y.
  • Further: Primary Rents 0.76% M/M, 8.76% Y/Y (8.56% last)           OER 0.7% M/M, 8.01% Y/Y (7.76% last)          Lodging Away From Home 2.3% M/M, 6.7% Y/Y (7.7% last)
  • Last month, OER and Primary Rents had slipped a bit and econs assumed that was the start of the deceleration. Maybe, but they re-accelerated a bit this month. Lodging away from home a decent m/m jump, but actually declined y/y so you can see that’s seasonal.
  • Some ‘COVID’ Categories: Airfares 6.38% M/M (-2.15% Last)       Lodging Away from Home 2.26% M/M (1.2% Last)          Used Cars/Trucks -2.77% M/M (-1.94% Last)                New Cars/Trucks 0.18% M/M (0.23% Last)
  • FINALLY we see the rise in airfares that has been long overdue. I expected this to add 0.01% to core; it actually added 0.05%. Those who want to say this is a good number will screech “outlier!” but really it’s just catching up. The outlier is used cars.
  • Both the Manheim and Black Book surveys clearly showed an increase in used car prices. But the BLS has recently changed methodologies on autos. Not clear what they’re using. Maybe it’s just timing and used will add back next month. We will see.
  • Here is my early and automated guess at Median CPI for this month: 0.634%
  • Now, the caveat to this chart is that I was off last month (the actual figure reported is shown), but that was January. I think I’ll be better on February. I have the median category as Food Away from Home. This chart is bad news for the deceleration crowd, and for the Fed.
  • Piece 1: Food & Energy: 7.97% y/y
  • OK, Food and Energy is decelerating, but both still contributed high rates of change. Energy will oscillate. It is uncomfortable that Food is still adding.
  • Piece 2: Core Commodities: 1.03% y/y
  • This is the reason headline was lower than expected. Core goods – in this case largely Used Cars, which I thought would add 0.05% and instead subtracted 0.09% from core. That’s a -14bps swing. +5bps from airfares, but health insurance was a drag…and we were still >consensus.
  • Piece 3: Core Services less Rent of Shelter: 5.96% y/y
  • …and this is the engine that NEEDS to be heading sharply lower if we’re going to get to 3.15% by end of year. It’s drooping, but not hard.
  • Piece 4: Rent of Shelter: 8.18% y/y
  • …and I already talked about this. No deceleration evident. As an aside, it’s not clear why we would see one with rising landlord costs, a shortage of housing, and robust wage gains, but…it’s an article of faith out there.
  • Core inflation ex-shelter decelerated from 3.94% y/y to 3.74% y/y. That’s good news, although mainly it serves to amplify Used Cars…but look, even if you take out the big add from sticky shelter, we’re still not anywhere near target.
  • Equity investors seem to love this figure. Be kind. They’re not thinking clearly these days. It’s a bad number that makes the Fed’s job really difficult.
  • Note that Nick Timiraos didn’t signal anything yesterday…that means the Fed hasn’t decided yet. Which means they cared about this number. Which means to me that we’re likely getting 25bps, not 0bps. Now, maybe they just wanted to watch banking for another few days, but…
  • …the inflation news isn’t good. As I said up top, 25bps doesn’t mean anything to inflation, but if they skip then it means we are back in QE and hold onto your hats because inflation is going to be a problem for a while.
  • Even if they hike, they will probably arrest QT – and that was the only part of policy that was helping. Higher rates was just accelerating velocity. But I digress. Point is, this is a bad print for a Fed hoping for an all-clear hint.
  • The only core categories with annualized monthly changes lower than -10% was Used Cars and Trucks (-29%). Core categories ABOVE +10% annualized monthly: Public Transport (+46%), Lodging AFH (+31%), Jewelry/Watches (+20%), Misc Personal Svcs (+17.7%), Footwear (+18%), >>>
  • Women’s/Girls’ Apparel (+15%), Tobacco and Smoking Products (+13%), Recreation (+11%), Motor Vehicle Insurance (+11%), Infants’/Toddlers’ Apparel (+11%), and Misc Personal Goods (+10%). Although I also have South Urban OER at +10%, using my seasonality estimate.
  • On the Medical Care piece, we really should keep in mind this steady drag from the crazy Health Insurance plug estimate for this year. It’ll almost certainly be an add next year. Imagine where we’d be on core if that was merely flat rather than in unprecedented deflation.
  • Let’s go back to median for a bit. The m/m Median was 0.63% (my estimate), which is right in line with last month. The caveat is that the median category was Food Away from Home but that was surrounded by a couple of OER categories which are the ones I have to estimate. [Corrected from original tweet, which cited 0.55% as my median estimate]
  • I can’t re-emphasize this enough. Inflation still hasn’t PEAKED, much less started to decline.
  • One place we had seen some improvement was in narrowing BREADTH of inflation. Still broad, but narrower. However, this month it broadened again just a bit and the EIIDI ticked higher. Higher median, broader inflation…and that’s with Used Cars a strange drag.
  • Stocks still don’t get it, but breakevens do. The 10y BEI is +7bps today. ESH3 is +49 points though!
  • We’ll stop it there for now. Conference call will be at 9:30ET (10 minutes). (518) [redacted] Access Code [redacted]. I will be trying to record this one for playback for subscribers who can’t tune in then.
  • The conference call recording seemed to go well. If you want to listen to it, you can call the playback number at (757) 841-1077, access code 736735. The recording is about 12 minutes long.

In retrospect, my forecast of 0.4% on seasonally-adjusted headline and 0.5% on core looks pretty good…but that’s only because we got significant downward one-offs, notably from Used Cars. If Used Cars had come in where I was expecting (+1.4%) instead of where it actually came in (-2.8%), and the rest of the report had been the same, then core inflation would have been 0.6% and we would be having a very different discussion right now.

As it is, this is not the number that the Fed needed. Inflation has not yet peaked, and that’s with Health Insurance providing a 4-5bps drag every month. That’s with Used Cars showing a drag instead of the contribution I expected. The “transitory” folks will be pointing to rents and saying that it seems ridiculous, and ‘clearly must decline,’ but that’s not as clear to me. Landlords are facing increased costs for maintenance, financing, energy, taxes; there is a shortage of housing so there is a line of tenants waiting to rent, and wage growth remains robust so these tenants can pay. Why should rents decelerate or even (as some people have been declaring) decline?

Apparel was also a surprising add. Its weight is low but the strength is surprising. A chart of the apparel index is below. Clothing prices now are higher than they’ve been since 2000. The USA imports almost all of its apparel. This is a picture of the effect of deglobalization, perhaps.

So all of this isn’t what the Fed wanted to see. A nice, soft inflation report would have allowed the Fed to gracefully turn to supporting markets and banks, and put the inflation fight on hold at least temporarily. But the water is still boiling and the pot needs to be attended. I think it would be difficult for the Fed to eschew any rate hike at all, given this context. However, I do believe they’ll stop QT – selling bonds will only make the mark-to-market of bank securities holdings worse.

But in the bigger picture, the FOMC at some point needs to address the question of why nearly 500bps of rate hikes have had no measurable effect on inflation. Are the lags just much longer than they thought, and longer than in the past? That seems a difficult argument. But it may be more palatable to them than considering whether increasing interest rates by fiat while maintaining huge quantities of excess reserves is a strategy that – as monetarists would say and have been saying – should not have a significant effect on inflation. The Fed models of monetary policy transmission have been terribly inaccurate. The right thing to do is to go back to first principles and ask whether the models are wrong, especially since there is a cogent alternative theory that could be considered.

Back when I wrote What’s Wrong With Money?, my prescription for unwinding the extraordinary largesse of the global financial crisis – never mind the orders-of-magnitude larger QE of COVID policy response – was exactly the opposite. I said the Fed should decrease the money supply, while holding interest rates down (since, if interest rates rise, velocity should be expected to rise as well and this will exacerbate the problem in the short-term). The Fed has done the opposite, and seem so far to be getting the exact opposite result than they want.

Just sayin’.

The Powell of Positive Thinking

March 8, 2023 7 comments

Yes: Federal Reserve Chairman Powell was very hawkish at his Congressional testimony on Tuesday and Wednesday. He clearly signaled (again) that once Fed overnight policy rates reach a peak, they would not be declining for a while. He additionally signaled that the peak probably will be higher than previously signaled (I’ve been saying and thinking 5% for a while, but it’s going to be higher), and even signaled the increasing likelihood of a return to 50bp hikes after the recent deceleration to 25bps.

This latter point, in my view, is the least likely since all of the reasons for the step down to 25bps remain valid: whether the peak is 5% or 6%, it is relatively nearby and the confidence that we should have that rates have not risen enough should therefore be decreasing rapidly. Moreover, since monetary policy works with a lag and there has been very little lag since the aggressive tightening campaign began, it would be reasonable to slow down or stop to assess the effect that prior hikes have had.

But here is the bigger point, and one that Powell did not broach. There is really not much evidence at all that the Fed’s hikes to date have affected inflation. It is completely an article of faith that they surely will, but this is not the same as saying that they have. Consider for a moment: in what way could we plausibly argue that rate hikes so far have been responsible for the decline in inflation? The decline in inflation has been entirely from the goods sector, and a good portion of that has been from used cars returning to a normal level (meaning, in line with the growth in money) after having overshot. How exactly has monetary policy driven down the prices of goods?

This is not to say that higher interest rates have not affected economic activity, and this (to me) is the real surprise: given the amount of leverage extant in the corporate world, it amazes me that we haven’t seen a more-serious retrenchment. Some of this is pent-up demand that still needs to be satisfied, for example in housing where significant rate hikes would normally dampen housing demand substantially and seems to have. However, there is a severe shortage of housing in the country and so construction continues (and home prices, while they have fallen slightly, show no signs of the collapse that so many have forecast). Higher rates are also rippling through the commercial MBS market, as many commercial landlords have inexplicably financed their projects with floating rate debt and where the cost of leverage can make or break the project.

Higher interest rates, on the other hand, tend to support residential rents, at least until unemployment eventually rises appreciably. I think perhaps that not many economists are landlords, but higher costs tend to not result in a desire to charge lower rents. On the commercial side, leases are for longer and turnover is more costly, but the average residential landlord these days is not facing a shortage of demand.

So where have rate hikes caused inflation to decline? Judging from the fact that Median CPI just set a new high, I think the answer is pretty plain: they haven’t. And yet, the Fed believes that if they keep hiking, inflation will fall into place. Where else can we more plainly see at work the maxim that “if a piece doesn’t fit, you’re not using a big enough hammer?” Or maybe, this is just a reflection of the notion that if you want something bad enough, the wanting itself will cause the thing to happen. [N.B. this is really more in line with the prescription from Napoleon Hill’s classic book “Think and Grow Rich”, but the title of Peale’s equally-classic “The Power of Positive Thinking” suggested a catchier title for this article. Consider it poetic license.]

Moreover, what we have seen is that higher interest rates have had the predicted effect on money velocity. Although I have elsewhere noted that part of the rebound in money velocity so far is due to the ‘spring force’ effect, there is substantial evidence that one of the main drivers of money velocity is the interest rate earned on non-cash balances. Enough so, in fact, that I wrote about the connection in June 2022 in a piece entitled “The Coming Rise in Money Velocity,” before the recent surge in velocity began. [I’d also call your attention to a recently-published article by Samuel Reynard of the Swiss National Bank, “Central bank balance sheet, money, and inflation,” where he incorporates money velocity into his adjusted money supply growth figure. Reynard is one of the last monetarists extant in central banking circles.]

Now, nothing that I have just written is going to deter Powell & Co from continuing to hike rates until demand is finally crushed and, according to their faith but in the absence of evidence to date, inflation will decelerate back to where they want it. But with long-term inflation breakevens priced at levels mirroring that faith, it is worth questioning whether there is some value in being apostate.

The Monetary Policy Revolution in Three Charts

January 18, 2023 Leave a comment

Over the last few years, I’ve pointed out exhaustively how the current operating approach at the Fed towards monetary policy is distinctly different from past tightening cycles. In fact, it is basically a humongous experiment, and if the Fed succeeds in bringing inflation gently back down to target it will be either a monumental accomplishment or, more likely, monumentally lucky. My goal in this blog post is to explain the difference, and illustrate the challenge, in just a few straightforward charts. There are doubtless other people who have a far more complex way of illustrating this, but these charts capture the essence of the dynamic.

Let me start first with the basic ‘free market’ interest rate chart. Here, I am showing the quantity of bank lending on the x-axis, and the ‘price’ of the loan – the interest rate – on the y-axis. If we assume for the moment that inflation is stable (don’t worry, the fact that it isn’t will come into play later) then whether the y-axis is in nominal or real terms is irrelevant. So we have a basic supply and demand chart. Demand for loans slopes downward: as the interest rate declines, borrowers want to borrow more. The supply curve slopes upward: banks want to lend more money as the interest rate increases.

An important realization here is that the supply curve at some point turns vertical. There is some quantity of loans, more than which banks cannot lend. There are two main limits on the quantity of bank lending: the quantity of reserves, since a bank needs to hold reserves against its lending, and the amount of capital. These are both particular to a bank and to the banking sector as a whole, especially reserves because they are easily traded. Anyway, once aggregate lending is high enough that there are no more reserves available for a bank to acquire to support the lending, then the bank (and banks in aggregate) cannot lend any more at any interest rate – at least, in principle, and ignoring the non-bank lenders / loan sharks. We’re talking about the Fed’s actions here and the Fed does not directly control the leverage available to loan sharks.

Now, traditionally when the Fed tightened policy, it did so by reducing the aggregate quantity of reserves in the system. This had the effect of making the supply curve go vertical further to the left than it had. In this chart, the tightening shows as a movement from S to S’. Note that the equilibrium point involves fewer total loans (we moved left on the x axis), which is the intent of the policy: reduce the supply of money (or, in the dynamic case, its growth) by restraining reserves. Purely as a byproduct, and not very important at that, the interest rate rises. How much it rises depends on the shape of the demand curve – how elastic demand for loans is.

As an aside, we are assuming here that the secondary constraint – bank capital – is not binding. That is, if reserves were plentiful, the S curve would go vertical much farther to the right. In the Global Financial Crisis, that is part of what happened and was the reason that vastly increase reserves did not lead to massive inflation, nor to a powerful recovery: banks were capital-constrained, so that the Fed’s addition of more reserves did not help. Banks were lending all that they could, given their capital.

Manipulating the aggregate quantity of reserves was the way the Fed used to conduct monetary policy. No longer. Now, the Fed merely moves interest rates. Let’s see what effect that would have. Let’s assume for now that the interest rate is a hard floor, and that banks cannot lend at less than the floor rate. This isn’t true, but for ease of illustration. If the Fed institutes a higher floor on interest rates then what happens to the quantity of loans?

This looks like we have achieved the same result, more simply! We merely define the quantity of loans we want, pick the interest rate that will generate the demand for those loans, and voila, we can add as many reserves as we want and still get the loan production we need. The arrows in this third chart show the same movements as the arrows in the prior chart. The quantity of loans is really determined entirely by the demand curve – at the prescribed interest rate, there is a demand for “X” loans, and since banks are not reserve-constrained they are able to supply those loans.

However, it’s really important to notice a few things. The prior statement is true if and only if we know what the demand curve looks like, and if the floor is enforced. Then, a given interest rate maps perfectly into Q. But:

  1. D is not known with precision. And it moves. What is more, it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with interest rates: for example, general expectations about business opportunities or the availability of work.
  2. Moreover, D is really mapped against real rates, while the Fed is setting nominal rates. So, for a given level of a nominal floor, in real space it bucks up and down based on the expected inflation rate.
  3. Also, the floor is not a hard floor. At any given interest rate where the floor would be binding, the desire of banks to lend (the location of the S curve) exceeds the demand for loans (by the amount of the ?? segment in the chart above). The short-term interest rate still affects the cost to banks of that lending, but we would still expect competition among lenders. This should manifest in more aggressive lending practices – tighter credit spreads, for example, or non-rate competition such as looser documentary requirements.

In the second chart I showed, the Fed directly controlled the quantity of reserves and therefore loans. So these little problems didn’t manifest.

Now, there is one advantage to setting interest rates rather than setting the available quantity of reserves as a way of reducing lending activity. Only the banking sector is reserve-constrained. If there is an adequate non-bank lending network, then the setting of interest rates to control the demand for loans will affect the non-bank lenders as well while reserve constraint would not. So this is somewhat “fairer” for banks. But this only means that non-bank lenders will also be competing to fill the reduced demand for loans, and the non-bank lending sector is less-vigorously regulated than the banking sector. More-aggressive lending practices from unregulated lenders is not, it seems to me, something we should be encouraging but what do I know? The banks aren’t lobbying me to help level the playing field against the unregulated.

Hopefully this helps illuminate what I have been saying. I think the final chart above would be a lovely final exam question for an economics class, but a bad way to run a central bank. Reality is not so easily charted.

2022 Year-End Thoughts About 2023

December 22, 2022 2 comments

Use: This article may only be reposted in its unedited entirety (including all links), including the title and author with linkbacks to the original. If you wish to repost in serial form, please contact me via the form at https://enduringinvestments.com to discuss.

When I was a Street strategist, and/or producing ‘sales and trading commentary’ as a trader, it was de rigueur to produce an annual outlook piece. Naturally, everyone does one of those; consequently, I stopped doing them. It seems to me like it would get lost in the shuffle (this is one of the reasons that Enduring’s “Quarterly Inflation Outlook,” which we distribute to customers and is also available by subscription here, is produced on the ‘refunding schedule’ of February, May, August, and November rather than at quarter-end). Having said that – it does seem that, given what inflation has done recently, there are more people asking for my outlook.

I do have to raise one point of order before I begin. As regular readers of this column know, in my writing, I generally try to propose the ‘right questions,’ and I don’t claim to have all the right answers. An outlook piece is often interpreted as being the analyst’s best guess at the answers. While it is that, for me the answers I suggest here are likely to be less valuable to the reader (I do not recommend that you blindly place trades based on my outlook for where markets will go!) than the thought process that is going into them. You may and probably will disagree with some of my answers. But hopefully, you’ll be able to identify where in my reasoning you have specific disagreements, which will either enhance your own view or cause you to thoughtfully reconsider it. That’s the whole point, and I don’t care at all if you disagree! That’s what makes markets.

Moreover…even if my guesses end up being “wrong,” or “right,” based on the actual outcomes in the future, that doesn’t mean they were wrong or right in terms of being a good approach/positioning. Investing is not really all about making the “right” bet in terms of whether you can call the next card off the deck, but about making the “right” bet with respect to the odds offered by the game, and betting the right amount given the odds and the edge. On this topic, I recommend “Thinking in Bets” by Annie Duke as excellent reading.

So, here goes.

MACROECONOMICS

For most of this year, I have been saying that we would get a recession by early 2023. In 2022Q1 and Q2, US GDP contracted. This produced the predictable shrill announcements of recession, coupled this year with sadly simple-minded declarations that the Biden Administration had “changed the definition of recession” by saying we weren’t in one. One television commentator I saw strongly profess the view that the two-quarters-of-negative-growth-is-a-recession definition is “in every economic textbook.” Having read my fair share of economic textbooks and having taught or tutored from a few, I can assure you that is not the case.

I was, and remain, sympathetic to the incoming fire that the Biden Administration took then, because they were basically right: whether we chose to call it a ‘recession’ or not, there was scant sign of any economic distress. Employment (which lags, of course) remained strong, corporate earnings were solid, confidence was reasonably high except for inflation, and citizens still had a substantial cash hoard left over from the COVID stimmy checks. However, while the critics were wrong on the timing they weren’t wrong about the eventuality of a recession. As I also said a bunch of times, there has never been a period where energy prices rose as rapidly as they did between early 2021 and mid-2022, combined with interest rates increasing as rapidly as they did thanks to Federal Reserve policy, that did not end in recession. But it takes Wile E. Coyote some time to figure out that there is nothing under his feet, before he falls, and recessions work similarly. We will have a recession in 2023.

We are already seeing the early signs of this recession. One indicator I like to look at is the Truck Tonnage index, which falls significantly in every recession (see chart, source Bloomberg). The last two months have seen a decline in this seasonally-adjusted index. It is early yet – we saw a similar-sized decline in 2016, for example, so there are false signals for small changes – but the fact that this decline happened heading into the Christmas season gives it more significance.

That’s the goods side. The services side shows up more in the labor market, which lags behind the overall cycle. Yet there too we have started to see some hints of weakness. Jobless claims are well off the post-COVID lows, although they are still roughly “normal” for the tight pre-COVID labor market. And the labor market is really hard to read right now, given the continuing crosswinds from the COVID-period volatility and the fact that so many services jobs now are at least partly virtual. Upward wage pressure is continuing, partly because virtual workers are less productive (shocker reveal there), so this recession in my view will probably not feel as bad as the last couple of recessions (GFC, Covid) have felt. However, we will have a recession in 2023.

The bad news, though is that a recession does not imply that inflation, ex-energy, will decline. Look at this chart, which captures the last three recessions. The post-GFC recession was the worst in 100 years, and while core inflation slowed that was almost entirely a function of the housing market collapse and not the general level of activity. The COVID recession was worse than that, and core inflation accelerated. And the post-tech-bubble recession wasn’t a slouch either; core inflation accelerated throughout 2001 until it started to decline, but only got down to 1.1%, in late 2003.

This chart shows y/y changes, but helpfully shows core-ex-shelter (Enduring Investments calculations). There isn’t a lot to see here in terms of the effect of these three huge recessions.

Lest you think I am just cherry-picking the 2000-2022 period, here is core CPI and GDP normalized as of December 1979. Again, you can see in the GDP line the recessions of the early 1980s, of the early 1990s, and that post-tech-bubble recession. I can’t see those, in the CPI line.[1]

And hey, as long as we are doing this…how about the 1970s malaise when the multiple recessions and flat growth led to … well, not disinflation.

I think the evidence is very clear: forecasters who are relying on the “recession” forecast (which I share) to make a “hard disinflation” forecast are simply ignoring the data. Those two concepts, outside of energy, are not related historically.

That being said, I expect core inflation and median inflation to decelerate in 2023. I just don’t think they will decelerate nearly as much as Wall Street economists think. Shelter inflation is already well above my model, and I expect will come back towards it, but my model otherwise doesn’t see a lot of downward pressure on rents yet. The strong dollar, and some healing of supply chains, will help core goods – but core goods inflation will remain positive next year and probably for a long time, thanks to secular deglobalization, instead of being in persistent slow deflation. And core services ex-rents will decelerate, but mainly because of the technical adjustment in health insurance. Until wages start to ebb, it’s hard to see a crash in core services ex-rents inflation. So that brings me to this forecast for core CPI:

Current2023 Fcast
Core Goods3.7%2.3%
Rent of Shelter7.2%4.8%
Core Services less ROS6.3%5.1%
Core CPI6.0%4.2%

Most of the Street is in the mid-2s for core inflation; the Conference Board forecast for Core PCE recently was raised to 2.8% which would put core CPI at 3% or 3.1%. They’re getting there, but frankly it’s hard to see how you can get to those levels. In my view, most of the risks to my forecast are to the upside.

MONETARY POLICY

An important disclosure should be made here: in 2022, I was utterly wrong about the path the Fed would take. Almost as wrong as it is possible to be. Ergo, take everything I say hereafter in this section with a grain of salt.

Coming into 2022, I thought the Fed would follow the same script they had used for more than a quarter-century with respect to tightening policy: slow, late, tentative, and quickly reversed. Although inflation was already plainly not transitory, I know that the Fed’s models assume a strong homeostasis especially with inflation, to the extent that the persistent part of inflation is essentially (albeit with a lot more math) modeled as a very slow moving average and overall inflation is assumed to pull back to that level. When the Fed talks about the “underlying inflation trend,” that is in simple terms what they are saying. But if you believe that, then there’s very little reason to pursue something similar to a Taylor Rule where policy is driven by simple deviations of growth and inflation from the target levels.

So, when the Fed started to move I expected them to tighten a few times and then to stop and ultimately reverse when financial markets started doing ugly illiquid things. One thing I didn’t anticipate: the markets never really did ugly illiquid things. Investors welcomed the tighter policy, and ran ahead of the Fed to give them room. Especially considering that, at the end of 2021, I think most sophisticated investors viewed the Fed as incompetent (at best) or counterproductive (at worse), the markets gave the Committee an amazing amount of latitude. The Fed, to its credit, saw the gap in the defense and sprinted through it. I did not see that coming.

After nearly 500bps of rate hikes, and a small decline in the Fed’s balance sheet, money supply growth has come to a screeching halt. That’s largely spurious, I think, since money supply growth is a function of bank lending and banks are neither capital-constrained nor reserve-constrained at the moment, and longer-term interest rates have risen but not very much (except in the mortgage market). I suspect that most of the decrease in loan demand that is evidently happening is not in response to the increase in short-term rates but rather to the increase in mortgage rates almost entirely. If that’s the case, then it’s a one-time effect on M2 growth: mortgage origination can only go to zero once. The chart below shows the connection between M2 growth (in blue) and the MBA Purchase index (black). The correlation is not as incredible as it looks, because one is a rate of change that is off-center by 6 months (it’s y/y) and one is a level of activity, but if I expressed both in rate of change you would still say they look suspiciously similar.

If I am right about that point, then the money supply will shortly resume its growth as the overall volume of lending continues to grow without the negative offset of declining mortgage origination. With money velocity on the upswing now, this will support the level of inflation at a previously-uncomfortable level. So what will the Fed do?

Importantly, the Fed won’t really know that inflation isn’t dropping straight to 2% until after the midpoint of the year. But they’ll make the decision to pause rate hikes sooner than that. I think a 5% Fed funds rate is a reasonable target given their assumptions, a key one of which is that if “underlying inflation” is really 2%-3% then a 5% nominal rate will be plenty restrictive.  

What is really amazing to me – which the ‘me’ of 2021 would never have anticipated – is that Fed watchers and market participants are starting to talk as if they believe the Fed might overdo the tightening, raising rates higher than needed to restrain the economy and inflation (yes, I know I said that a recession doesn’t cause lower inflation but it’s an article of faith at the Fed so we need to pretend as if we believe it). It’s incredible, when you think about it: the Fed hasn’t come close to ‘overdoing it’ in a tightening cycle in decades, if by ‘overdoing it’ we mean that they caused a deflationary crash. The Fed has caused plenty of recessions, but core inflation hasn’t been negative since the Great Depression. And we’re worried about them overdoing it?

Naturally, if you don’t think that raising rates causes inflation to come down then any rate hikes at all…actually, any active monetary policy at all…is too much. But in any event, it’s striking to me that the Fed has somehow restored some credibility as a hawkish central bank. Not that credibility per se matters, since expectations don’t cause inflation. But I digress. It’s still pretty amazing.

When Powell was first named Chairman, I was hopeful that a non-economist could help break the Fed out of its scholarly stupor. As time went on I lost that hope, as Powell trotted out various vacuous terms like “transitory” and leaned on discredited models (nevertheless still in vogue at the Fed) such as those which utilize the ‘anchored expectations’ hypothesis. But I have to say, my opinion of him has risen along with the Fed funds rate.

In my view, the biggest Fed error of the last forty years was Greenspan’s move to make the Fed transparent, which caused the pressures on the Fed to be entirely one-way. The second-biggest Fed error follows from that, and that is the tendency to move rates further and further away from neutral, holding rates at such a level by maintaining vastly higher levels of liquidity than were needed to run the banking system. The consequence of this has been a series of bubbles and asset markets at levels where the prospect of future real returns was abysmal. Plus, it led to the heyday of hedge funds where cheap money levered small returns into big returns.

The Powell Fed, for all of its flaws and awful forecasting, has succeeded in getting the yield curve to the vicinity of long-term fair value, which I define as sovereign real rates near the long-term growth rate of the economy (2.00-2.25% in the US – see chart below, source Enduring Investments before 1997 and Bloomberg after 1997). With a Fed inflation target at 2.25% or so in CPI terms, this means long-term nominal interest rates should be in the vicinity of 4%-4.5% over the long term in the context of a responsible central bank. We’re not there, but we’re getting close.

All of which means that I think the FOMC is just about done with hiking rates for this cycle. I believe they will get to 5%, pause, and stay paused for a long time. I do not expect them to lower interest rates, even if there is a recession, unless markets or banks start to have difficulties or Unemployment gets above 6%. That might happen in late 2023, but even if it does I think the Fed will be much more measured about cutting rates than they have in previous cycles. Credit to Powell for the change in attitude.

Those pieces, the Macro and the MonPol, along with my assessment of relative valuations, inform everything else.

RATES, BREAKEVENS, AND CURVES

The long, long, long downtrend in interest rates is decisively finished. As noted above, when inflation is under control and in the vicinity of the Fed’s 2% target, long-term interest rates should be in the vicinity of 4-4.5%. Over the last century, when rates have been away from the 3-5% range it has generally been either because inflation was unstuck on the high side (1970s, 1980s) or unstuck on the low side (1920s, 1930s, 2010s) (see chart, source Federal Reserve and Bloomberg). The long-term downtrend can be thought of as going from unstuck-high inflation, to normal, and overshooting to the downside in the last decade. But we have now definitively ended that low-rates period.

At a current level of roughly 3.5% nominal, 1.4% real, interest rates are ‘too low’ again, but this is normal for an economy headed into recession. Ordinarily, this configuration of events – a Fed nearing the end of a tightening cycle, a recession looming, and interest rates that have risen 320bps over two years – would make me bullish on bonds. And I do think that the first part of 2023 may see a decent rally as the Fed finishes their business and the stickiness of inflation is not yet apparent, but the recession is. Seasonally, you’d really prefer to be long the bond market/out of equities in the last quarter of the year and out of the bond market/long equities in the first quarter of the year, but I think the seasonal pattern will be reversed this year. So we will come in all happy as bond investors, and get unhappy later in the year.

The reason I think the first quarter of the year will be pretty decent for bonds is because of the timing of the recession and of the end of the Fed tightening cycle. But why the selloff as the year progresses? Well, investors will start to see that inflation is not falling as fast as they had expected, the Fed is showing no signs of easing…and the Federal deficit is blowing up.

In FY 2022, the US government had a $1.38 trillion deficit,[2] in an expansion during peacetime. But there are some inexorable effects pushing that higher next year. For example, interest on the debt: higher interest rates will affect only the part of the public debt that has rolled over, but that is an awful lot of it.

In December 2021, the rolling-12-month interest expense on US Debt Outstanding (see chart, source Bloomberg) was $584bln.[3] As of November 2022, the rolling-12-month expense was $766bln. It will be up another $100bln, at least, in 2023. Social Security benefits paid this year were roughly $1.2 trillion, and benefit payments are due to increase 8.7% next year – so, even neglecting the fact that there will be more recipients next year, Social Security should also be $100bln further in the red. That’s $200bln, on top of the approximately $1.4trillion deficit, and I haven’t even considered Medicare, the decline in tax receipts that will occur thanks to a decline in asset markets this year, or the decline in taxes on earned income when the economy enters a recession. A $2 trillion, peacetime deficit is easily in reach and will be much more if it’s a bad recession. The last time we had that big a deficit, the Fed happened to also be buying a couple trillion dollars’ worth of Treasuries. This time, though, the Fed is shrinking its balance sheet.

It is fairly easy to imagine that longer interest rates will have to rise some, in order to roll the maturing debt. As I said, higher interest rates don’t really bother me because I don’t run a highly-levered hedge fund. (But if the rise in rates were to get sloppy or rates were to rise enough to threaten a spiral in the deficit, then I can imagine the Fed stepping in to reverse its balance sheet reduction and being under even more pressure to guide rates lower. However, it’s not my base case.)

Also, as the year goes along the stickiness of inflation will become more apparent and investors will rightly start to put that assumption back into their required return for nominal bonds. One of the really crazy things that happened in 2022 was that inflation compensation in nominal bonds (aka ‘breakevens,’ the mathematical difference between yields on nominal bonds and yields on inflation-linked bonds that pay inflation on top) declined even as the overall level of inflation continued to climb. At the time of this writing, Median CPI has not yet even decisively peaked, although I think it will. But with Median CPI at 6.98%, it’s incredible that the market is demanding only 2.28% annual compensation for inflation over the next decade (see chart, source Bloomberg). That basically says investors are comfortable earning an increment that underpays them for inflation in the near term, and in the long term will only compensate them for what the Fed says they are trying to pin inflation at.

That’s not as easy a trade as it was when 10-year breakevens were at 0.94% in March 2020, but it still seems to me that most of the risk over that decade would be for inflation to miss too high, rather than too low. I understand that the FOMC wants inflation down around 2%. And as for me, I want a Maserati. Neither one of us is likely to get what he wants, just because we want it.

As the first quarter of the year passes and long-term interest rates decline, the curve may invert further from its current level. But I don’t think it can invert that much, which limits the value to being long, say, 10-year notes from this level. Given the current level of inversion, it is fairly easy to construct steepener trades that throw off positive carry. For that matter, a leveraged investor who is financing at 4.5% and earning 3.75% is more likely to want to go the other way! I think it’s going to be difficult to get a good bull market rally going in bonds, and if I was a leveraged hedge fund investor I’d be playing from the short side/steepener side even in the first quarter of the year (albeit cautiously). The chart below (source: Bloomberg) shows 2s/10s monthly going back to 1980. The only time the curve was more inverted was in the early 1980s, a couple of years after Volcker’s Saturday Night Special and with the hiking campaign solidly underway as it is now. I’m expecting 2s/10s to go positive in 2023, although the best shot at something like +50bps would come if the Fed actually did ease. Ergo, a steepening trade is also nice because it works in my favor more if I’m wrong about the Fed staying on hold for a while after they finish hiking to 5%.

Put those together and I see Fed funds at 5%, 2yr Treasuries at 4.25%, and 10s at 4.5%.

We obviously look deeper than that, though, on this channel. We can separate nominal yields into real yields (represented by TIPS) and inflation compensation (breakevens, or inflation swaps). Here are what the curves look like today (source: Enduring Investments).

From here, it looks fairly obvious that a good deal of the steepening should come from longer-term real rates rising. The 2y TIPS bond is at roughly 2%, so 2s-10s in reals is about the same as it is in nominals. The inflation curve is ridiculously flat. I do think that the inflation curve is more likely to shift higher in parallel than to steepen; a steepening inflation curve would imply accelerating inflation going forward and I don’t think investors really believe we’ll get acceleration. So I think that the movement in the shape of the TIPS curve will be very similar to the movement in the nominal curve, but with the level of the nominal curve being driven by an upward parallel-ish shift in the inflation curve.

2y10y
Current TIPS Yields1.96%1.42%
EOY TIPS Yields1.80%1.85%
Current Breakevens2.30%2.27%
EOY Breakevens2.45%2.65%

VOLATILITY

Generally speaking, a higher-inflation environment is a higher-volatility environment. The chart below (source: Bloomberg) shows core CPI in blue against the ICE BofA MOVE Index of fixed-income option volatility. True to form, the higher-inflation regime has correlated with higher levels of fixed-income volatility.

It isn’t terribly shocking that volatility is higher in bonds than it had been during the years when interest rates were fixed within a stone’s throw of zero. And it shouldn’t be terribly shocking that I expect volatility to stay somewhat higher than the 2017-2019 and 2020-early 2021 levels, even as core inflation recedes somewhat. What may be surprising is the observation that a sizeable gap has opened up in the behavior of fixed-income volatility and equity volatility, as the following chart comparing the VIX (equity vol) and MOVE (fixed-income vol) shows. Note that these are different axes, but you can clearly see the uptrend in the MOVE that has not been replicated by the VIX.

I mentioned earlier how regular and controlled the decline in the stock market has been, and how this has allowed the Fed to push rates further than anyone thought they would, a year ago. There have not been too many periods where option sellers have been punished for being short vol in equities. On the other hand, bond vol has been very different now from what it was a few years ago. In short, there has been a regime change in bond vol, but not in equity vol. At some level, this will continue, but the spread should narrow as the Fed gets to the end of the tightening regime. I think we will end 2023 with the VIX above 22 log vol – where it is today or slightly higher – but with the MOVE around 90 norm vol.

Both of those figures represent more-volatile conditions than we have seen for some years pre-COVID.

EQUITIES

It hurts to say, but equities are still far, far, far overvalued.

For many years, there has been a running tension between people who use the “Fed model” as a way to justify the current level of the stock market and the people who point out that the “Fed model” does not imply that the current level of the market is fair. The “Fed model” essentially says that when interest rates are very low, the present value of future cash flows is higher; ergo, the equilibrium value of the average equity (whose fair value is dependent on the present value of future earnings) and hence the overall stock market is higher, when interest rates are lower. This is analytically true. However, it does not mean that your expectation of future returns, when P/E multiples are at 40 but interest rates are low, should be the same as your expectation when P/E multiples are at 15 but interest rates are high. The level of interest rates explains higher equity prices, but it does not imply that those are now long-term fair value levels.

But this tension was almost always resolved in favor of the people who thought that rock-bottom interest rates meant that stocks should be at sky-high multiples, and value investors were left in the dust for more than a decade.

Unfortunately, this tension is being reduced because interest rates are going higher, and may never go back to those levels again. Consequently, equity price/earnings multiples need to re-rate for the new level of interest rates. The same logic that was used to justify the stock market at a 35 Shiller P/E, reconciles to lower prices now and going forward. The chart below (source: Robert J Shiller, updated with Enduring Investments calculations) shows the Shiller P/E (aka Cyclically-Adjusted P/E Ratio, or CAPE) versus 10-year interest rates in the post-WWII period. There is, ex-Internet bubble, a pretty clear relationship between interest rates and valuations. The red dot is where current multiples and interest rates are.

My forecast of 4.5% 10-year Treasuries implies something like a 23 Shiller P/E, down from 30 now. Without earnings growth, that 23% decline in the multiple implies a 23% decline in the stock market from these levels. I don’t think earnings themselves will increase or decrease very much unless the recession is much worse than I think it’s going to be, but the same lag between wages and product prices that flattered earnings when inflation was heading higher will detract when inflation decelerates. Moreover, if I’m right that Powell is intentionally steering interest rates to a level that is consistent with a long-term equilibrium around 4%-4.5% then this 23% adjustment in prices will not necessarily be followed by another massive bull market the likes of which we became accustomed to during the long bond bull market of the last 40 years. A Shiller P/E in the low-20s is still fairly generous historically but it may be sustainable.

So, my point forecast is for the S&P to get to 3,000 sometime in 2023. I don’t think the current bear market will last the entire year, and in fact I am sure there will be a rollicking rally when it is clear the Fed is done tightening. But sticky inflation will hurt here, too, and after that rollicking rally I think we’ll have another low, and from that low is where a modest bull market will begin.

However, I should also note that 1-year equity vol is around 25%, so my projection is within 1 standard deviation of unchanged!

COMMODITIES

From 1999 through 2008, commodities were in a bull market. After a brutal crash in the Global Financial Crisis, commodity indices had another mini-bull market from 2009-2011 before enduring a 9-year bear market. Since March 2020, the massive increase in the quantity of money has driven down the value of money relative to commodities or, to put it in the normal way, has driven up the price of commodities.

The Bloomberg Commodity Index (spot) rose from 59 in March 2020 to 124 in March 2022, and has come off the boil a bit since then. At the highs, though, the level of the index was only back to the levels of 2014. This is normal with spot commodities, which thanks to improved production and extraction technology over time tend to be perpetually deflating in real terms.[4] The good news is that an investor in commodities does not generally buy spot commodities but rather invests through collateralized futures contracts or invests in an index based on collateralized futures contracts. Over time, the collateral return happens to be a very important source of return (in addition to spot returns, the return from normal backwardation, and the volatility/rebalancing return), and this year there is terrific news in that collateral returns are ~4% higher than they were before the Fed started to hike. This means that, all else equal, commodities index returns should be expected to be 4% better (in nominal terms) this year than over the last couple of years. All else is not equal, but I expect gains in investible commodities indices in 2023.

That’s entirely separate from the question of whether we are in a commodity supercycle, due to chronic underinvestment in exploration and extraction technologies and more difficult geopolitical pressures that increase the costs of mining, growing (e.g. because of fertilizer costs/shortages), and transporting the raw commodities. I think the answer there appears to be ‘yes,’ which means that in general I want to play the commodity market from the long side more than from the short side. Of course there will be brutal moves in both directions, and bears will really want to sell commodities as the recession comes to the fore. But most of that is already in the price, with gasoline at levels much closer to the GFC lows than to anything approximating the highs. The chart below shows retail gasoline prices, adjusted for inflation (using 2012 dollars).

Energy prices of course could fall further, but considering that part of the reason prices have fallen this far is that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been flushing oil into the system (and that has ended, in theory) and China’s economy has been sputtering under Zero Covid (which has also ended, in theory), it is hard to think that is the better direction at the moment.

OTHER THINGS

I want to append one very important admonition for investors and investment advisors. I mention this frequently on podcasts, TV and radio appearances, at cocktail parties and to random strangers on mass transit:

The next decade will be very unlike the decades we have just experienced. Not only will inflation and interest rates be higher than we’ve become accustomed to, and markets more volatile, but some important drivers of portfolio construction will shift. The good news is that at least some of those shifts are systematic and predictable. The table below shows how 60/40 returns correlate with inflation, with inflation expectations, and with inflation surprise over two periods. The first period was the 30 years ending in 2004, when inflation averaged 4.89% and was three times as volatile as during the subsequent period. During that period, a 60-40 portfolio was significantly exposed to inflation. The more-recent period, during which inflation was low and stable, produced placid 60/40 returns and correlations with inflation that are mostly spurious because there was more noise than signal. Inflation didn’t move!

The first implication of this is that portfolios which have productively ignored inflation-fighting elements over the last two decades need them now, because the main asset classes used in portfolio construction are terribly inflation-exposed. All portfolios for investors who do not have sufficient ‘natural’ inflation hedges should include such assets as commodities and an allocation to inflation-linked bonds in lieu of some of the nominal bond allocation.

The second implication is related but less conspicuous. The entire correlation matrix is shifting away from what it has been over the last couple of decades, and back to something that incorporates the inflation factor that has been dormant. As the most obvious example, stocks and bonds which have been inversely correlated for a while, due to the fact that they respond differently to economic growth, are becoming correlated again. This is not an aberration but entirely normal for regimes in which inflation is not low and stable. The chart below illustrates this. When 3-year average inflation is above 3% (the red shaded area), then 3-year correlations of stocks and bonds tend to be positive (blue line). When inflation is below that level, correlations tend to be negative.

Negative correlations between stocks and bonds are great because they lower portfolio risk. But in the coming decade, 60/40 won’t be as low risk as it has been. But beyond that, the entire covariance matrix that an advisor relies on to simulate and optimize portfolios needs to be examined. The normal way is to use recent returns (say, the last 10 years) to generate this covariance matrix, which then is used to find the mean/variance-optimized portfolio for a given level of risk. That’s normally okay, but as inflation proves sticky that sort of covariance matrix will be wrong, and wrong in a systematic way. What I am doing for our customers is comparing portfolios optimized with a recent covariance matrix to portfolios optimized using a covariance matrix from the 1980s-1990s. It’s important to be aware of this potential problem in portfolio construction, and to get ahead of it.


Finally, let me take a moment to thank the readers of this blog for their interest in it. I write partly because the discipline of arguing my points out thoroughly makes me (I think) a better trader and investor, but I also garner a lot of value from the information and ideas I receive reciprocally from readers who agree or disagree with what I write. I appreciate this feedback very much, and I thank the readers who take the time to share their opinions with me.

Aside from the personally selfish reason I have for writing, there is also the corporate mission the blog is meant to accomplish, and that is to raise the profile of Enduring Investments and the Inflation Guy franchise with prospective clients, and to encourage them to do business with us. If prospective clients see value in these musings, then I hope they will choose to do business with us. Yes, that’s crassly commercial. But ‘tis the season! And if you read this far in this missive, please consider what that means about the value you’re getting, and how much more value you might get from a deeper relationship with Enduring Investments!

And if not, Merry Christmas anyway! Happy holidays and Happy New Year.    

– Mike ‘The Inflation Guy’ Ashton

DISCLOSURE – My company and/or funds and accounts we manage have positions in inflation-indexed bonds and various commodity and financial futures products and ETFs related to them that are discussed in this column.


[1] It bears noting, though, that until 1982 the shelter component of CPI was tied to mortgage rates and home prices and not rents, so that the early-80s rise in core CPI partly reflected the Volcker rate hikes. Fixing that problem was what released the conspiracy nuts who plague us to this day claiming that the BLS “manipulated” CPI downward.

[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-deficit/

[3] Net interest was about $110bln less, since some of that interest is paid to other parts of the government, for example the Federal Reserve system. For now.

[4] I wrote a nice, short little piece called “Corn Prices – Has the Correction Run its Course?” that is worth reading if you are interested in commodities.

Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets (October 2022)

November 10, 2022 Leave a comment

Below is a summary of my post-CPI tweets. You can (and should!) follow me @inflation_guy, but to get these tweets in real time on CPI morning you need to subscribe to @InflGuyPlus by going to the shop at https://inflationguy.blog/shop/ , where you can also subscribe to the Enduring Investments Quarterly Inflation Outlook. Sign up for email updates to my occasional articles here. Investors, issuers and risk managers with interests in this area be sure to stop by Enduring Investments! Check out the Inflation Guy podcast! Note that this month and going forward, I will be delaying the drop of this tweet summary and the podcast until the afternoon rather than dropping it late morning. So subscribe if you want it live!

  • It’s CPI Day – and here we go again!         
  • A reminder to subscribers of the path here: At 8:30ET, when the data drops, I’ll be pulling that in and will post a number of charts and numbers, in fairly rapid-fire succession. Then I will retweet some of those charts with comments attached. Then I’ll run some other charts.      
  • Afterwards (hopefully 9:15ish) I will have a private conference call for subscribers where I’ll quickly summarize the numbers.    
  • Thanks again for subscribing! And now for the walkup.  
  • The chance of more-lasting inflation just went up a lot. With the much-narrower-than-expected margins for the Republicans in the House – and perhaps no margin at all in the Senate – this is “divided government” IN NAME ONLY.     
  • Republicans are notoriously bad at whipping their vote, and with a narrow margin it will be very easy to pick off a couple of votes with well-chosen pork to pass large stimulus measures if the Democrats want it. And they probably want it.             
  • And why shouldn’t they want it? The Republican message in the midterms was “Biden caused this inflation and we voted against the Inflation Redution Act.” The Democrat message was “Putin caused this inflation and we PASSED the Inflation Reduction Act.” Evidently, that resonated.          
  • Politicians will keep pushing MMT as long as the populace allows them to get away with it. And with such a narrow majority, Republicans can probably not ‘hold the line.’ Ergo, there will be more stimulus ahead.  
  • To say nothing of other continuing pressures, on resources & a need to shorten supply chains as the world fractures the post-Berlin-wall detente. To say nothing of demographic challenges. To say nothing of the fact that prices still have far to go to catch aggregate M2 growth.      
  • Those are not stories for the October CPI, but they are the backdrop.      
  • I was at a conference the last 2 days and several mainstream economists stated (it was barely phrased as an opinion) that core inflation will definitely be around 3% by middle of next year and low 2s by end of 2023.               
  • This seems ignorant of the composition of the CPI. EVEN IF you think inflation pressures in a macro sense are ebbing, we haven’t yet seen any signs of that in the data. Y/Y median CPI has accelerated 14 months in a row. Rents remain buoyant. 
  • Rents will eventually slow, but it will be a while before they slow very much. So far they are still accelerating! And core-services ex-rents is my recent focus. As a reminder, that’s where you find the wage-price feedback loops. And it has recently started spiking higher.
  • But there is a potential fly in the ointment in that group this month, and that’s the question about the CPI for health insurance. Here is the issue that some people are worried about.
  • Medical care is paid for by consumers directly, and indirectly for consumers by insurance companies. It is straightforward (if complex) to measure the part of medical care paid directly to providers – just ask doctors and hospitals.
  • The problem is that there is a difference between what insurance companies receive from consumers (which is part of consumers’ cost) and what they pay to doctors. That is, profit.
  • That’s still a cost to consumers but not captured if you just ask doctors. It shows up in the “Health Insurance” part of Medical Care CPI. So, periodically (because it’s not at all straightforward) the BLS tries to figure out this difference and adjust for it.
  • It tends to happen roughly this time of year, which is why people were looking for it last month and still looking for it this month. Here’s the problem – it isn’t always important.
  • You can see in the m/m changes in Health Insurance that sometimes there’s a discontinuity in the monthly figures, and sometimes not. Here’s the salient point, though – the adjustment doesn’t really matter.
  • If it’s done right, then the overall inflation in Medical Care will be about right. Could be seasonal issues, so any given month it could be wacky, but the REAL question is: is inflation in Medical Care overall accelerating/decelerating? Sure looks to me like it’s accelerating.
  • So I don’t pay a lot of attention to this nuance but be aware that it COULD have an impact potentially today.
  • Last month, big drivers were Rents again (primary=0.74%, OER=0.71%), Medical Care (0.68%, with Hospital Services 0.78% m/m and y/y Prescription Drugs at 3.2%, highest since 2018). Oh, and “Other” at +0.73%.
  • Inflation is of course very broad, and that means it is going to keep being pretty resilient. Until one day it starts narrowing and being less resilient. There’s no good way to say when rents will roll over. They will eventually. Probably not today.
  • But breakeven market is being very optimistic generally about this eventual occurrence! There’s almost no penalty to betting inflation will NOT go back to its old level. Or at least, a pretty small one.           
  • Used cars this month will again be heavy, but probably not as heavy as last month’s -1.1%. Used car prices have retreated (in the Black Book survey) about 12% from the highs but remain up about 35% since end of 2020. That’s about the same as M2, so it’s roughly “right”.       
  • Of course not everything will be up the same amount as the general price level, but that’s a decent touchstone. On average, once velocity finishes correcting back, the aggregate price level should be +30%-+35% (based on current M2) from 2020. Currently +15%. Long way to go.
  • Markets since last month: breakevens are up a bit, but real yields close to unchanged. Reals are pretty close to a long-term fair level. They’ll go higher if nominals go higher but they’re a pretty decent deal esp relative to nominals given the long term breakevens.
  • …and the nominal auction yesterday was pretty ugly, so I don’t know that the fixed-income bears are done. I suspect the Fed is getting close, though. My guess for terminal rate is currently 5%.          
  • Econ consensus for today’s CPI is 0.62% m/m on the headline and 0.47% m/m on core, bringing y/y core to 6.52%. With the medical insurance issue I’m reluctant to hazard a guess but 0.47% seems optimistic. Avg for last 6 months has been 0.56%. But interbank is LOWER than 0.47%.         
  • In any event, good luck! Auto charts will follow the print fairly quickly. I don’t know how many months I will be doing this before I stop being nervous about the automation. But I throttle those charts still to make sure that if something looks wrong it isn’t followed by 9 more.

  • m/m CPI: 0.438% m/m Core CPI: 0.272%       
  • OK now let’s look at these. Obviously the core figure was a disappointment but I can already see it’s not something I’m terribly worried about and not likely to signal that we’re done. That said, it should be a nice rally number.     
  • Last 12 core CPI figures        
  • Primary Rents: 7.52% y/y OER: 6.89% y/y     
  • Further: Primary Rents 0.69% M/M, 7.52% Y/Y (7.21% last) OER 0.62% M/M, 6.89% Y/Y (6.68% last) Lodging Away From Home 4.9% M/M, 5.9% Y/Y (2.9% last)
  • Well, 0.69% m/m is better than last month’s 0.84% on primary rents, but not exactly the deflation that people are expecting to happen ‘soon.’ Soon, it seems, is still a bit far away.
  • M/M, Y/Y, and prior Y/Y for 8 major subgroups          
  • Immediate observation – huge decline in Apparel (yes, a small weight) and in Medical Care (which I suspect is the technical adjustment). Housing, Food, Other, Recreation, all high.
  • Here is my early and automated guess at Median CPI for this month: 0.613%
  • Median: definitely better than recently! but a 7.6% compounded annual median rate isn’t GOOD news. And it suggests that most of the miss was in a few categories, not the main body of the distribution.
  • By the way, a little asterisk on my median calculation – I have the median category as West Urban OER. Since the individual components of OER are seasonally-adjusted (but we don’t know the seasonals), my estimate will be slightly off.
  • Core Goods: 5.08% y/y Core Services: 6.74% y/y        
  • And you can see the effect of Apparel (and Used Cars, which was down more than I expected it would be and more than Black Book suggested it would be) on core goods. This is partly a delayed dollar effect, and some supply-side relaxation, and not surprising in a macro sense.
  • Some ‘COVID’ Categories: Airfares -1.1% M/M (0.84% Last) Lodging Away from Home 4.85% M/M (-1.04% Last) Used Cars/Trucks -2.42% M/M (-1.07% Last) New Cars/Trucks 0.37% M/M (0.67% Last)           
  • So Used Car prices are coming down, and New Cars still going up. Remember in mid-2021 Used Car prices in some cases exceeded New Car prices b/c New weren’t available. They are now, so this is the convergence. Used is correcting, New is trending.
  • Used cars on top, New Cars on bottom, since day 1 of COVID. New have another 10% to go higher, Used another 15% lower, is my guess.
  • Piece 1: Food & Energy: 13.3% y/y   
  • Piece 2: Core Commodities: 5.08% y/y          
  • Piece 3: Core Services less Rent of Shelter: 6.42% y/y              
  • The y/y for health insurance went from 28.1% to 20.6%. Obviously, those numbers are way too high. But it caused the y/y for Medical Care to drop from 6% y/y to 5% y/y. This seems exaggerated.
  • Now, to be sure Medicare is dropping the amount that it is reimbursing health care providers. But Medicare is not in CPI and a squeeze on Medicare reimbursements may make the consumer part of health care more resilient. Got to pay health care providers somehow.
  • Piece 4: Rent of Shelter: 6.99% y/y  
  • No sign of any slowdown in rents yet. And without that, we’re not getting 2% inflation next year, period.
  • That really was an amazing adjustment to health insurance. I applaud those who decided it was going to be huge. Again, though, it’s just a question of how Medical Care inflation gets allocated. And it’s a one-off thing.          
  • Outside of food and energy, the biggest monthly decliners were Infants and Toddler’s Apparel (-32% annualized), Jewelry and Watches (-30%), Used Cars and Trucks (-25%), and Footwear (-13%). No services. OTOH…             
  • Biggest gainers were Lodging Away from Home (+77% annualized), Misc Personal Goods (+26%), Vehicle Insurance (+23%), and Food Away from Home (+11.8%). That last one is obviously Food & Energy but it’s also a wages indicator.
  • Looking at Median some more, probably the lowest it could be (if my West Urban OER seasonal is way off) is 0.55%. And could also be higher than my estimate. 
  • Core inflation ex-housing fell to 5.9% from 6.7%. That’s the lowest it has been since 11/2021. And it’s a good sign. A lot of that is goods.            
  • The deceleration in goods inflation is completely real. But that doesn’t mean goods prices are going to go DOWN, which is what consumers are expecting. Some places where there were overshoots like in Used Cars will go down, but in most cases we’re talking small.             
  • Here’s the challenge on the Fed question. I wouldn’t take a victory lap even though this is the lowest core m/m in more than a year. Median has still not obviously peaked! Next core comps are 0.52%, 0.56%, 0.58%, 0.50% before 0.32% in March.       
  • That means we are probably looking at core which will be steady to declining slowly, but not coming down rapidly. There aren’t 0.6s or 0.7s to roll off until May. So it will look like a peak but not a rapid drop. Unless of course rents roll over and drop like a stone.
  • OR, suddenly workers start getting wage cuts. Keep in mind that the Social Security adjustment for next year will flush a lot more money into the system. There’s just a lot of bad feedback loops that are in play.
  • By the way, Lodging Away from Home was high (+4.9% m/m) this month. That’s a volatile category but surprised me. Hospitality is having difficulty with finding workers though and so this is another one of those pass-throughs I suspect.      
  • Here’s the distribution of lower-level price changes y/y. It’s an interesting tale. The lower tail are mostly goods (insurance won’t be there for a long while), upper tail has some foods and some services. The middle part is still 7-9%.
  • Having said that, this is starting to look more like a disinflationary distribution where the mean is below the median because long tails start showing up to the lower side. I think we’ve likely seen the peak, although Median will take a bit yet.
  • I mean we still have 65% of the distribution above 6%…        
  • That health care insurance adjustment is odd. Normally the BLS smears the adjustment over 12 months roughly equally. I can’t imagine this is going to be 4% PER MONTH for a year. That would be really weird. Something to dive deeper on. For now I’m treating it as one-off.   
  • Last chart. I didn’t run this last month because of tech issues. The EI Inflation Diffusion Index remains high but dropped to 41. It’s not yet really signaling a peak in pressures but if we get down to 30 or 35 I’ll feel better that the peak is real.       
  • OK, let’s try the conference call for anyone who wants to hear this verbally. 🙂 [REDACTED] Access Code [REDACTED] Let’s say 9:35, 5 minutes from now.       

The number today made a lot of folks very happy, but it is a trifle early to declare victory over inflation yet. Core goods remains in deceleration mode. This is no surprise; the extended strength of the dollar helps depress core goods prices with a lag. The sharp drop in apparel prices is sort of the poster child for this effect. But the dollar will not be strong forever, and when it goes back to something like fair value – when the Fed stops hiking aggressively relative to the rest of the world – then there will be a little payback in this category. That doesn’t mean 10% core goods inflation but neither does it mean that we’re going back to the old normal of -1% inflation in core goods year after year. Given the re-onshoring trend and the general unsettled nature of geopolitics, I suspect core goods will end up oscillating around low-positive numbers. Think 1-2%, not -1% to -2%.

Rents remain strong, and there is no sign that they’ve rolled over yet. They will eventually, but it takes a long time for rents to reflect changes in home prices and even longer for asking rents to be fully reflected in rent CPI and OER. Rents will decelerate from here, but not for a while. And they’re also not going back to 2%.

Core services ex-rents is in a continued uptrend. There was a small correction this month, but the feedback loop has been triggered. Next year’s Social Security adjustment will throw more fuel on the fire, and even if unemployment rises so that real median wages decelerate nominal wages are going to keep climbing faster than they have historically. Core services ex-rents…and we saw similar effects in Lodging Away from Home and Food Away from Home, both of which have a big wage component…is going to stay strong for a while.

By the way, on Medical Insurance…that 4% per month drag over the next year is going to add up to 0.3% on headline and a bit more than that on core. But only if this isn’t offset elsewhere in the medical care category. This is bean-counting: insurance in the CPI doesn’t really measure the cost of insurance premiums but insurance company profits. If our estimate of profits declines it’s either because people are paying less for insurance (not likely) or because insurance companies are paying more out to doctors, which means the inflation should just show up there instead. So it will be a consistent drag that is mostly irrelevant in a practical sense.

All of which is to say that while core CPI has likely peaked, and median inflation will probably peak in a few months, the folks who are looking for it to drop to 2% next year are going to be terribly disappointed. I’m sticking with my view that we will be at high-4%, low-5% for 2023.

The Fed, though, will take the peak in Core as a reason to step down to 50bps at the next meeting, then probably 25bps, and ending at around 5%. If rates are at 5% and median inflation is around the same level late next year, it isn’t clear that much higher rates would be called for especially in a recession. But neither will much lower rates. So I think overnight rates get to 5% and then stay stuck there for a while. If you found this useful, and would like to get it in real time during next month’s CPI report, go to https://inflationguy.blog/shop/ and subscribe to my private Twitter feed. You can also subscribe to my quarterly, or purchase a single issue of the Quarterly Inflation Outlook (either current or historical). Thanks a lot for your support.

Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets (September 2022)

October 13, 2022 8 comments

Below is a summary of my post-CPI tweets. You can (and should!) follow me @inflation_guy, but to get these tweets in real time on CPI morning you need to subscribe to @InflGuyPlus by going to the shop at https://inflationguy.blog/shop/ , where you can also subscribe to the Enduring Investments Quarterly Inflation Outlook. Sign up for email updates to my occasional articles here. Investors, issuers and risk managers with interests in this area be sure to stop by Enduring Investments! Check out the Inflation Guy podcast!

The tweets below may have some deletions and redactions from what actually appeared on the private feed. Also, I’ve rearranged the comments on the charts to be right below the charts themselves, for readability without repeating charts, although in real time they appeared in comments associated with a retweeted chart.

  • It’s CPI Day – and here we go again!
  • A reminder to subscribers of the path here: At 8:30ET, when the data drops, I’ll be pulling that in and will post a number of charts and numbers, in fairly rapid-fire succession. Then I will retweet some of those charts with comments attached. Then I’ll run some other charts.
  • Afterwards (hopefully 9:15ish) I will have a private conference call for subscribers where I’ll quickly summarize the numbers.
  • After my comments on the number, I will post a partial summary at https://inflationguy.blog and later will podcast a summary at inflationguy.podbean.com . Busy day for the IG.
  • Thanks again for subscribing! And now for the walkup.
  • Last month, we again had a large upward surprise. Median CPI actually had its highest m/m print of the entire debacle-to-date. While y/y numbers are the big focus in the media, until we have a convincing peak in Median CPI we can’t really say the inflation pressures are receding!
  • Median CPI has moved back above core; this means that for the first time since April 2021 the longer tails are to the downside (the distribution skews lower, so the average is lower than the median).
  • If this is still true once inflation levels out a little bit, it will be encouraging. In inflationary cycles, the outliers show up on the high side and core moves above median. In disinflationary cycles, the opposite is true. Let’s give it some time and see what happens.
  • Rents in last month’s report were big, and though Used Cars set back a little bit New Cars had a big up. But the BIG eye-opener was the rise in core services less rents.
  • I wrote last month: “If core services ex-shelter is really taking the baton from core goods, that’s really bad news. Because core services ex-shelter is where wage pressure really lives. If you want a wage-price spiral, look in core services ex-shelter to see if it’s happening.”
  • So that is my main focus in this report. More later but let’s look at the consensus figures going in. Consensus for headline CPI is 0.21%/8.09%, while consensus for core CPI is 0.43%/6.52%. That will be a small acceleration in core (again).
  • For my money, the implied drag for food and energy (0.22%) looks slightly too large, and the interbank market seems to agree with an implied headline number of about 0.26% m/m. But I also think the core might come in a teensy bit lower than 0.4%.
  • I don’t know if what I am looking at would be enough to round it lower, but an 0.3% core print would make the markets very excited and COULD make the Fed favor a smaller move at this meeting. Not only because of 0.3%, but because things are starting to break.
  • …and the Fed’s models say that inflation should be slowing, so…why not taper the tightening? I think we MIGHT be having that discussion later this morning.
  • Certainly, the mkts have let the Fed go pretty far without throwing up a stop sign. 2y rates +72bps in the last month and 10y rates +54bps? Tens at 3.90% are pretty close to a long-term fair number (still a trifle low) after YEARS of being too low. Naturally, we could overshoot!
  • The decline in forward breakevens is very curious – I don’t see any sign that 2.25%-2.5% as a long-term equilibrium is still the attractor we will drift back to. The fun house mirror is broken for good I think.
  • So where do I see some potential softness? Our models have rents leveling off – not peaking per se, but leveling off – and that means that a trend projection of last month’s number might be overdone. Of course, those are just models.
  • More important (and obvious to many) is the decline in Used Cars prices. Last month, Used were a small drag but New cars added a bunch. We could still get the bump in New, but Used ought to be a decent drag based on the Blackbook figures.
  • But as an aside, this goes back to the error being made by a whole lot of people and politicians especially. See that last chart? Does it say “used car prices are coming back down and reverting, now that supply chain issues have cleared up? NO.
  • It’s a mistake, the same one people are making in rents & home prices. Rates of change could mean-revert. Prices will not. Prices are permanently higher, b/c the amount of money in the system is permanently higher. This chart shows the price level. Not going back to the old days.
  • Politicians saying inflation should ebb soon SEEM to be telling constituents that prices are going back down. At least, that’s what the constituents hear. They will be mad when the politicians say “see?” and they see all prices 30% higher than pre-COVID.
  • (I actually think something similar may be the root of a lot of conspiracy theories about how the government ‘cooks’ the numbers. They’re just talking past each other, with one talking price level and one talking rate of change.)
  • And speaking of money in the system – money supply growth has come to a screeching halt over the last few months, which is great news. Unfortunately, we are still catching up to the prior increase in money, which is why it will take a while for inflation rates to come back down.
  • There’s still work to do. Anyway, a lot of that is wayyyy beyond the trading implications for today’s figure. The key for me is to look past used cars and rents, and look at CORE SERVICES EX RENTS. That’s one of our “four pieces” that you’ll see in a few minutes.
  • If there’s softness in core, it will be taken well by both stocks and bonds and while I might fade stocks in a day or two, I’m not sure I’d fade a rate rally at least at the short end. If I’m wrong, and the core number is HIGHER…it could get pretty ugly. Liquidity is bad.
  • That’s all for the walk-up. Ten minutes until kickoff. Good luck today and thanks again for subscribing! Charts will launch a minute or two after 8:30, assuming data drops on time at the BLS.

  • welllllp. Not soft!
  • m/m CPI: 0.386% m/m Core CPI: 0.576%
  • Further: Primary Rents 0.84% M/M, 7.21% Y/Y (6.74% last) OER 0.81% M/M, 6.68% Y/Y (6.29% last) Lodging Away From Home -1% M/M, 2.9% Y/Y (4% last)
  • Last 12 core figures. About the same as last month. And if you exclude the two little dips, the other 12 are all pretty much 0.58% ish. That’s uncomfortable stability! Don’t want to see that. Comps get tougher going forward so core might not go up much more…but no sign of down.
  • Here is my early and automated guess at Median CPI for this month: 0.667%
  • Now, Median stepped down so that’s good news…but 0.667% m/m is not terrific. This is still the third-highest m/m in the last 40 years or so!
  • M/M, Y/Y, and prior Y/Y for 8 major subgroups
  • In the major subgroups, the drop in apparel stands out. The dollar’s strength is definitely affecting goods prices, and Apparel is one place where we see that most clearly.
  • Core Goods: 6.63% y/y Core Services: 6.65% y/y
  • It’s cute to see Core Goods and Core Services kissing. We know that goods are eventually going to go back down to 0-3%…especially if the dollar remains strong.
  • Primary Rents: 7.21% y/y OER: 6.68% y/y
  • This is a surprise – a further acceleration in rents. Economists might look past this, because with home prices leveling off rents won’t keep shooting higher and higher. Will they? Our model has a peak happening but if wages keep rising then rents need not decline, just slow.
  • Some ‘COVID’ Categories: Airfares 0.84% M/M (-4.62% Last) Lodging Away from Home -1.04% M/M (0.08% Last) Used Cars/Trucks -1.07% M/M (-0.1% Last) New Cars/Trucks 0.67% M/M (0.84% Last)
  • In the covid categories, Used Cars was in fact a drag. And New Cars was in fact a bump higher. There have been some big stories recently about markups for new trucks etc so this isn’t a surprise. But again, core goods will eventually decelerate.
  • Piece 1: Food & Energy: 14.2% y/y
  • Again Food & Energy is decelerating, but again it’s not as much as expected BECAUSE food, which we ordinarily mostly ignore, keeps rising. 10.8% y/y on Food & Beverages!
  • Piece 2: Core Commodities: 6.63% y/y
  • Piece 3: Core Services less Rent of Shelter: 6.62% y/y
  • Soooo…this is the piece that’s sort of ugly and I was worried about this. Core services less rent-of-shelter continues to accelerate. Medical Care was another 0.77% m/m, with Hospital Services 0.66% m/m. I’ll look at some of the other categories in a bit.
  • Piece 4: Rent of Shelter: 6.68% y/y
  • Core ex-housing (not just core services ex-housing) rose to 6.7% y/y. It had gotten as low as 6.04% two months ago but is reaccelerating. We know core goods is decelerating so the upward lift is core services ex-housing. And as I noted, that’s bad.
  • I forgot to mention that the median category was New Vehicles. As always with my Median CPI estimate, I caution that I have to estimate the seasonals on the OER subindices and if I’m off, and an OER category is near the median, then my Median guess might be off too.
  • Food AT HOME was 0.6% m/m (SA), 12.98% y/y. That’s slightly lower than it has been. Food AWAY FROM HOME, though, was +0.94% m/m, 8.48% y/y. This is bad – food commodities are leveling off a little, but wages show up in food away from home.
  • This number could have been worse. Airfares being -4.62% m/m helped. Airfares are largely driven indirectly by jet fuel, but had been positive last month so this is a catch-up. However, jet fuel is probably not going to go down much futher.
  • Conclusions: (a) this number is worse than expected. And not from little ‘I don’t care’ one-off things. (b) Where wages show up in the economy, we are seeing more inflation pressure show up in CPI. That’s not evidence a wage-price spiral has begun, but it is suggestive.
  • (c) since in yesterday’s FOMC minutes, participants had been musing about the risk of a wage-price spiral, this is especially salient right now. (d) This seals 75bps. They won’t do 100bps, and this report doesn’t let them do 50bps.
  • (e) This MAY raise the terminal rate. We will get more inflation data, but median CPI isn’t showing a deceleration and the m/m core is pretty solid at a 7%-ish rate (0.58%/mo) with occasional dips. Need at least 2 dip months.
  • (f) The deceleration in core goods is already happening. It has been happening. The dollar’s strength will help it to continue. But the acceleration in core services is more durable and not dollar-sensitive.
  • (g) it’s also not particularly rate-sensitive. (h) Higher wages also support higher rent growth. I am surprised at the extent of the strength in rents but put that (somewhat) in the wage-price spiral camp.
  • And finally (i) inflation markets are ridiculously mispriced. There is no reason to think that 2.25%-2.5% is the fair bet for 10-year inflation, especially when it’s going to be at 5% or above for the first 2 years of that 10 years. This is going to take a while.
  • I’m going to do a quick call right now and present my thoughts. Dial-in is <<redacted>> and Access Code <<redacted>>.
  • I will throw another housing-related chart here. Here is OER in red, against two home-price indices that are often used to model rents as a lagged function of home prices. The leveling-off should happen soon. BUT>>
  • …BUT the betas have changed and OER is higher than we would have expected based on the prior relationship. Those regressions were all based on nominal changes, not real…part of home price increase should be pass-through of value of real property, greater when infl is higher.
  • Either way, the timing suggests we should level off, and if you believe this model then in 6-12 months rents should be in sharp retreat. Maybe. But like I say, things have changed from the 2001-2020 baseline!

We keep waiting for a clear turn in inflation, and it hasn’t happened yet. Moreover, the longer it lasts then the more likely that it feeds back into wages, since workers have more and more evidence to take to the bargaining table when it’s time to discuss increases. Some of the feedback loops are purely automatic: For example, on the basis of today’s figure Social Security benefits next year will jump 8.7%, giving retirees an additional slug of cash to spend next year. That automatic adjustment also creates a feedback loop in deficits, of course – that big increase in benefits will also increase federal outlays! So, if you were hoping to balance the budget rather than pour more fuel on the fire…it just gets harder and harder.

The slight drop in m/m median CPI is nice, but not sufficient to signal that inflation pressures have turned. For a very long time, everyone else was surprised with the resilience in inflation and I was not – but now I’ve joined the ranks of those who are surprised. I haven’t thought, and do not think, that inflation will fall back to 2% any time soon, but I also didn’t think it would keep accelerating into year-end. I still don’t think that. But…it’s also hard to see where the deceleration is going to come from. Our models (and the final chart above) give reason to think that rents might level off from here, but not decelerate much; core goods will continue to retreat but core services seem to have a feedback loop going. The fact that food away from home is accelerating while food at home is correcting slightly is emblematic of the passing of the torch from raw materials pressures to wage pressures. This is not good.

That being said, and while 75bps is pretty much cemented now at the next Fed meeting, I still think that the FOMC is looking for reasons to slow the pace of hikes. Things are starting to break around the world, and there’s no appetite (I don’t think) to test the limits of the system’s fragility right now. But the balance sheet is going to continue to shrink slowly, and that’s a big part of the decline in market liquidity. Certainly, the market has been generous with the Fed so far and hasn’t offered them the Hobson’s choice of saving the markets or pushing inflation lower…but that choice is going to come sooner or later especially as inflation has not yet shown any real signs of slowing down.

And yet, as I write this the stock market has closed the gap by rallying up to yesterday’s closing level, and is spiking higher. That’s remarkable, and I think it’s fadeable!

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