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Understanding Biden’s Poll Numbers Despite a ‘Strong Economy’
The Biden team keeps talking about how they can’t believe how underwater the President’s poll numbers are, when the economy is so frickin’ good. “As soon as people figure out how frickin’ good it is, they’ll come running to vote for him.”
At some level, one can be sympathetic with that view. Inflation is down to only 3.1%, the Unemployment Rate is still sub 4% even with the most-recent rise, well below the levels when he took office; Average Earnings are up and gasoline prices are down around $3 after being above $5. What’s not to like? Moreover, put this record next to Trump’s record! When Trump came into office, Unemployment was 4.7% and when he left it was 6.7%!
The problem that the Biden team has – and, frankly, the one it has always had – is that they have no idea how actual people experience the economy, and no idea how actual people think.
Americans, on average, tend to be fair. When people think about the Trump years, they recognize that it isn’t quite fair to saddle him with COVID. While they don’t think this explicitly, their memories about the 2016-2020 period fall into “pre-COVID” and “post-COVID” zones. In other words, if in mid-March 2020 a particular consumer was positively disposed towards the Trump economy, then that’s what their memory is. When COVID hit, it started a new time period in their memory. So to the normal person, they remember Trump coming in with a 4.7% Unemployment Rate and watching as it fell to 3.5% in February 2020. “Then COVID hit.” This works against Trump in little ways too; no one gives him credit for the disinflation that happened between March 2020 and the end of his term.
So this is the way that normal people see Trump’s record:
Now, the best part of Biden’s record is that Unemployment fell from 6.7% when he took office to 3.7% as of January. Other than that, though, his record in the minds of Americans looks unimpressive. (Of note is – and folks, don’t shoot the messenger; I’m just showing the data – that the Biden team persistently claims that real earnings have risen during his Administration, while it isn’t so.)
And so now, let’s put them side by side. Inflation is higher under Biden, gasoline prices have risen under Biden, real earnings are down under Biden, and food costs are up (a lot) under Biden. The unemployment rate has fallen more, but is now higher than it was pre-COVID under Trump!
If you realize that Americans are not going to blame Trump for COVID, then it gets very easy to understand why Trump polls better on the economy.
What Happens if CPI Isn’t Released?
One thing I’ve stopped worrying very much about is a government shutdown. It could even be a good thing, given the bloated deficit, except for the fact that the government basically keeps spending anyway. The federal government employs about 4.5mm workers, and no more than 800k have every been furloughed – moreover, many of those furloughed workers often receive back pay. Social Security gets paid, Treasuries get paid, and the wheel keeps turning. That’s not a guarantee, of course – it’s possible that an extended shutdown could cause Treasuries interest to not be paid, but we all know that before that happens, the Fed would just print the money and make sure the checks go out. At worst, there could be a one-day technical default, if important people had given the heads-up to insiders to get really long CDS.
But my cynicism is getting the better of me so let’s turn to what could happen in a shutdown that impacts the inflation markets: in the past, some data releases of federal agencies have been delayed (or their quality impacted), and if the delay was long enough then it could affect TIPS. Lots of people are asking about this, so I thought I’d lay out what would happen and how.
First of all, the quality of the CPI data could potentially be impacted. That has happened in the past, because data collection agents are not ‘essential workers’ so if the government shuts down, a lot of the data collection stops. This is less of a problem than it has been in the past, though, because a lot more of the data is collected electronically than in the past. For example, the new cars sample is no longer collected by hand but is sourced from J.D. Power. Prescription drugs data is partly supplied by one large firm that didn’t want to allow data collectors to collect data in store. A similar story applies to apparel. Many of these ‘big data’ changes are discussed in this BLS white paper, but the point is that these changes also mean that the quality of the data won’t be impacted as much as would be the case if data collection was entirely done by hand as it once was.
The bigger potential problem is that the CPI report could be delayed.[1] The NSA CPI is used almost exclusively as the index in inflation swaps, and is the index that determines escalation of TIPS principals. Other subindices are used in contract arrangements (for example, in long-term airplane purchase contracts), but those applications are generally less urgent.
If the BLS is unable to release the CPI on October 12th, what happens? The first thing to know is that the September CPI (which is what is released in October) is only relevant to swap payments and TIPS accruals in November and December. For each day in November, the inflation index is interpolated between the August and September prints; for each day in December, the inflation index is interpolated between the September and October prints. Ergo, missing the September print would make it impossible to settle inflation swaps payments – but more importantly, every TIPS trade that settles in November or December would be impossible to settle because the invoice price couldn’t be calculated.
Fortunately, the Treasury thought about that a very long time ago. Title 31 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) spells out what would happen if the BLS didn’t report a CPI by the end of October (it also spells out what happens if the BLS makes a large change to the CPI, or stops calculating it). In a nutshell, the Treasury would use the August CPI index, inflated by the decompounded year-over-year inflation rate from August 2022-August 2023:
I’ll do the math for you. If the CPI isn’t released, the figure for September will be 307.94834, which is +0.3004% on the month. While that sounds very convenient, since economists are forecasting a +0.3% m/m change for this data point, remember that the economists’ +0.3% is seasonally adjusted while the +0.3004% change is NSA. The difference is that 0.3004% NSA is about 0.50% SA this month.
Naturally, this wouldn’t matter very much in the long run; once the October CPI was released at the proper level the artificial change from Sep-Oct would wash out the artificial change for Aug-Sep.
Except, that is, for one pain-in-the-ass way, and that is the second part of the code snippet shown above: the Treasury would never adjust the official number back to match the BLS back-dated release of September CPI. Forever after, if you ran the sequence of monthly Treasury CPI Index numbers and the BLS CPI numbers, they would be exactly the same except for the one data point. The economic significance of that approaches zero, but the Inflation-Guy-Irritation figure on that approaches infinity.
So let’s hope cooler heads prevail.
[1] How likely is this? Kalshi has a market for this as well as markets on the probability of a government shutdown and the length of a government shutdown. As of this writing, Kalshi traders are saying there is an 18% chance that the CPI data will not be released in October.
Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets (October 2022)
Below is a summary of my post-CPI tweets. You can (and should!) follow me @inflation_guy, but to get these tweets in real time on CPI morning you need to subscribe to @InflGuyPlus by going to the shop at https://inflationguy.blog/shop/ , where you can also subscribe to the Enduring Investments Quarterly Inflation Outlook. Sign up for email updates to my occasional articles here. 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.
Inflation is a Tax
We all have heard it said before: “inflation is a tax.” It seems that when most people say it, they seem to mean that it’s painful, like a tax is. That both inflation and taxes hurt the little guy, more than the big guy. That the other political party is responsible for bad things, and these are both bad things, so they imply the same thing: vote for me!
When Milton Friedman said it, he meant inflation is a tax.
We recently have seen in an uncommonly explicit way just what this means. It isn’t something vague but an actual tax. It takes money from you, but it doesn’t stop there – it transfers that money to government coffers. I thought of this recently when I saw a headline about how government receipts were breaking records. The headline seemed to think this was great news, but I am a taxpayer so my natural reaction was: dang it. Indeed, receipts at all levels of government are way up for a bunch of reasons. Incomes are higher, so income taxes are higher. Corporate earnings are higher, so corporate taxes are higher. Retail prices are higher, so sales tax collections are higher. And real estate prices are higher, so real estate taxes are higher. To the extent that these things are higher because of higher real activity, it isn’t a bad thing – but at least part of the increase in receipts is due to inflation. Buy the same item today as you did last year and the price is going to be roughly 8-9% higher on average, which means that your sales tax will also be 8-9% higher. If your restaurant bill is 10% higher this year; so is the tax…and the tip, which is income. So it shouldn’t be a terrible surprise that overall federal receipts over the last twelve months are up. By about 27%, actually, compared to the twelve months ended in March 2021.
To be sure, the 12 months ended in March 2021 included a lot of the shutdown, although you can see in the chart that the shutdown didn’t really hurt receipts that much. But to make a better comparison: the first three months of 2022, compared to the first three months of 2021, federal receipts were +18.8%. It’s good to be the king, in inflationary times. At least until the rabble figures out where their money is going.
How much of the overall increase in tax collections is inflation? Over a long period of time, most of it although you are correct in your visceral sense that the pound of flesh has become more like 2.5 pounds of flesh over time.
The chart above shows rolling 12-month tax receipts, indexed to 12/31/1980. The red line is nominal receipts; the blue line is taxes adjusted for inflation. Since 1980, taxes have still gone up about 150% in real terms, about 2.25% per year. That’s not far from what the real growth rate of the economy has been, although to be fair about 22% of that is since the beginning of 2021.
[As an aside: if the “inflation truthers” are right about inflation really being about 5-6% higher per year than the government admits to, since the early 1980s, then either tax burdens have been going dramatically lower in real terms or the government is also lying about government receipts which must actually be orders of magnitude higher. You see how absurd this argument gets?]
So the government gets more revenue when you produce more, but it also gets more just because prices go up. Inflation is a tax.
While it isn’t directly illustrated in the charts above, this is one way that inflation contributes to inequality. It takes more from the less-well-off than it does from the well-heeled. Inflation is not only a tax – it is also a very regressive tax.
The Political Temptation Posed by “Price Gouging”
The arc of explanations about the rise in inflation and the end of the disinflationary era was foreordained:
- There’s no inflation.
- What you’re calling inflation is just a series of one-offs.
- This is just a ‘transitory’ phenomenon, a one-off at the broad economy level, and will soon fade.
- “It’s actually okay.” (NY Times: Inflation Could Stay High Next Year, and That’s OK)
- It’s greedy manufacturers and vendors that are price-gouging. Where is my pitchfork?
In the current arc, we are already easing past level 3, as “transitory” is starting to be stretched a bit to “well, not past 2022” (Former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke opined yesterday at an online event that inflation would “moderate” in 2022). And we’ve seen signs of #4, and even some #5. The blame game is heating up, and with an Administration under pressure for its handling of…well, everything…I suspect we will move sooner rather than later into the full-blown level 5, complete with price controls in some industries and possibly economy-wide. Yes, there’s a very clear lesson from history that price controls don’t work to restrain inflation, but (a) today’s politicians don’t seem to really know much history, and (b) price controls need not be about restraining inflation – for some, it’s worth the political points.
Since it’s a term we will hear more of, I thought I’d try and put a little more structure around the accusation of “price gouging.” It is an easy term to throw around, but what does it mean?
Developed economies are still mostly free markets, in that buyers and sellers are given wide latitude to negotiate on price and quantity. In certain markets, where there are limitations on competition (electric utilities being a classic example) or vast differences in negotiating power or information (health insurance?) there are limits on the terms of trade but for the most part, if you want to buy an apple from the apple vendor you can strike whatever deal suits you both. In a free market, either the buyer or the seller can choose not to transact at the proffered price; ergo, economists assume that if a transaction occurs then both buyer and seller made themselves better off or at least not worse off. Unlike many economist assumptions, this one doesn’t seem like a bad one, at least in most cases.
If the price is “too high” for the buyer, then the buyer can complain but the buyer can always choose to not transact. So there’s only two senses in which “price gouging” might mean something:
- The price is egregiously high because the seller knows you really have no alternative, as the buyer, other than to buy. If there is a mandate to buy insurance or lose your liberty, but no cap on the price of insurance, then the insurance provider can charge any price it wants. This is infrequent. Arguably, in the aftermath of hurricanes it might apply to building materials, but even in that case I would argue #2 below is a more-accurate sense of the word.
- The price is, in some sense, “unfair.”
What is “unfair?” We do, as social animals, have some innate sense of fairness. A classic result from “the ultimatum game,” where one person is endowed with money that he/she chooses unilaterally how to split with a second person who can in turn accept the split or reject it (in which case both parties get nothing) is that under experimental conditions splits that are worse than 70:30 tend to be rejected by the responding party – in other words, the respondent would rather get zero than 30%, if it feels “unfair.” It is in that context that “price-gouging” accusations could be related to “anchored” inflation expectations. If a vendor is charging a very high price, but the buyer expects price changes to be large, volatile, and generally not in the buyer’s favor, then an accusation of “price gouging” is less likely than if the buyer expects price changes to be low and random. So, it might be that accusations of price gouging simply means that the buyers have not adjusted to a new inflation/pricing paradigm, and perceive the price increases as unfair even if they are objectively fair.
If that’s the case, then the buyer is going to lose in cases where the higher prices are a result of changes in the supply/demand balance. Higher prices are how limited supply gets rationed among the buyers – it is a feature, not a bug, of the capitalist system. In the case where a surge in demand (caused by, say, massive government transfers to consumers) causes stock-outs and rising prices, then accusations of price gouging are just sour grapes. Rising prices in this case are simply normal inflation happening in an environment that has not adapted to normal inflation again. (Listen to the Inflation Guy Podcast, episode 2, where I point out that “supply chain problems” is exactly what inflation caused by too much money looks like.)
Nevertheless, where the “price gouging” accusation is code for “this feels unfair,” it is a terrific opportunity for a political lever. Politicians will feel that they can make people happy by instituting price controls, and blaming the wealthy industrialist, even though economics and history tell us that this isn’t the right answer. But it is a siren song, and I think that we are very likely to start hearing this more and more.
Once price controls are instituted, what follows is that the stock market craters (since the difference between input costs and consumer prices is some part profit), a black market develops in the restricted goods and services, and many products get impossible to acquire or rationed by a lengthening waitlist rather than by price.
Can you really control prices in the Internet age? It hardly matters. Politicians don’t really care about controlling prices after all; they merely want to appear as if they’re on the side of the voters. Bashing suppliers is one easy way to do that. I don’t think it will be long now. Keep the torches and pitchforks at the ready.
Drug Prices and Most-Favored-Nation Clauses: Considerations
A potentially important development in the market for pharmaceuticals – and in the pricing of the 1.6% of the Consumer Price Index that Medicinal Drugs represents – is the President’s move towards a “most-favored-nation” clause in the pricing of pharmaceuticals. The concept of a favored-nations clause is not new, although this is the first time it has been applied broadly to the pharmaceutical industry. In the investment management industry, it is not uncommon for very large investors (state pension funds, for example) to demand such a clause in their investment management agreements. Essentially, what such a clause does is guarantee to the customer that no other customer will get better pricing.[1] In the context of pharmaceuticals, the “problem” that the President is addressing is the fact that Americans buying a drug will often pay many times what a customer in another country will pay the pharmaceutical company for that same drug.
The optics are terrific for the President, but the economics not as much so. The argument is that demanding such a clause will force pharmaceutical companies to lower prices for American consumers drastically, to something approximating the price of those same products purchased abroad. The reality, though, is not so clear.
This is a story about price elasticity of demand. As I do often, I pause here and give thanks that I studied economics at a university that had a fantastic econ faculty. Economics is a great field of study, because done right it teaches a person to ask the right questions rather than jumping to what seems to be the apparent answer. (Incidentally, I feel the same way about Street research: done right, the value of that research is in guiding the questions, rather than handing us the answers.)
So let’s start at the ‘free market’ version of the pharmaceutical company’s profit-maximization problem. Let’s start by assuming that the marginal cost of production of a little pill is close to zero, or at least that it’s no different for the pill sold in one country versus the pill sold in another country. Then, the firm’s profit-maximizing linear programming problem is to maximize, independently for each country, the price where the marginal revenue is essentially zero – where in order to sell additional units, the price must be lowered enough that selling those additional units costs more in lost profit on the other units than it does on the incremental units. (If I sell 10 units at $10, and in order to sell the 11th unit I have to lower the price to $9, then I go from $100 in revenue to $99 in revenue and so if I am a profit-maximizer I won’t do this).
This point will be different in each country, and depends on the demand elasticity for that drug in that country. If the demand for a drug is very elastic, then that market will tend to clear at a lower price since each incremental decline in price will produce a relatively large increase in incremental quantity demanded. On the other hand, if the demand for the drug is very inelastic, then that market will tend to clear at a higher price since each additional increase in price will result in the loss of relatively few units of quantity sold. Now, every country and every drug will have different price elasticities. A lifestyle drug like the little blue pill will face fairly elastic demand in a Third World country, while a malarial drug probably does not.[2]
As an aside, one of the things which creates a more-elastic demand curve is the availability of substitutes. So, if the FDA makes it more difficult for a new statin drug to be approved than does the equivalent agency in Italy, then demand for a particular statin drug (all else equal) will be more elastic in Italy, where it faces more competition, than in the US. If you want lower prices, promote competition. But back to our story:
Now the Trump Administration adds a constraint to the drug company’s linear programming problem, such that the maximization is now joint; the problems are no longer independent maximization problems but the company must find the price that maximizes revenue across all markets collectively. If the free market has found a perfect and efficient equilibrium, then any such constraint must lower the value of the revenue stream to the drug company because if it did not, then it implies the company would already have be operating at that single-price solution. Constrained solutions can never be more valuable than unconstrained solutions, if both are in equilibrium.
What the drug company most assuredly will not do, though, is immediately lower the price to the American consumer to the lowest price charged to any other country. What it will do instead is take the highest price, and then add the incremental market that has the most inelastic demand, and see how much total revenue will increase if they have to lower the universal price to induce demand in that market. Note that this outcome may lower the price in the high-priced country, but it will also raise the price in the low-priced country. Since the lower-priced countries probably have more-elastic demand than the high-priced country…which is suggested by the fact that they had lower prices when they were being separately optimized…it is easy to imagine a scenario where the drug company ends up only supplying the high-priced country because the large increases in price for other countries essentially eliminate that demand. And that outcome, or indeed as I said any constrained outcome, is likely to be bad for the drug company. But what it will almost certainly not do is cause drug prices in the USA to drop 70%, or a massive decline in the Medicinal Drugs portion of CPI.
It may cause a decline in US drug prices, but that is not as certain as it appears. If the optimal strategy is to supply the drug only in the United States, then prices need not change at all (the US would then be the Most Favored Nation because it’s the only customer). In fact, the drug company might need to increase prices in the US. That happens because when you allow price discrimination, any customer who pays more than the variable cost of the product (which we assume here is close to zero) contributes something to the fixed overhead of the company;[3] therefore, a company that understands cost accounting will sometimes sell a product below the total cost per unit as long as it is above the variable cost per unit. When a US company, then, sells a pill to Norway at a really low price but above the cost of production, it defrays some of its overhead. If a most-favored-nation clause prevents a company from doing this, it will need to raise the price of the product in its remaining markets in order to cover the overhead that is not being covered any longer by those customers.
OK, so that’s just one iteration. I suspect that most pharmaceutical companies will end up lowering prices a little bit in the US and in other countries where prices are similar, and only selling them in countries that now pay a very low price to the extent that those foreign countries and/or international charities subsidize those purchases. But then we get into the financial and legal engineering part of this: what happens if Pfizer now licenses the formula for a particular drug to an Indian company that is legally distinct and doesn’t sell to the United States? Does the licensing agreement also fall under the MFN clause? What if Pfizer spins off its South American operations, sharing the intellectual property with its spinoff? For that matter, it might be the case that for some drugs, it is optimal to sell it everywhere in the world except the US, because the value of the unconstrained-non-US portion of the business is greater than the constrained-US portion of the business.
Now wouldn’t that be a kick in the head, to see pharmaceutical companies leave the US and refuse to sell to the US consumer because it makes them subject to the MFN clause? In the end, it seems to me that this is a great political gesture but it will be very difficult to get the results the President and his team wants.
[1] As an aside, in investment management this has caused the universe of strategies available to institutions demanding this clause to be reduced, hurting their investors. There are many circumstances in which an investment manager will offer outstanding, and sometimes outlandish, terms to investors who are the first in a new strategy, or who are low-touch easy/sophisticated customers, etc; a later entry by a large, high-maintenance customer may not be economic under the same terms.
[2] I am not at all an expert on how drug price elasticity behaves in this riot of market/product combinations, so readers who are should give me a break! I’m just illustrating a point.
[3] Cleverly called “variable contribution.”
How Not to Do Income-Disparity Statistics
I am a statistics snob. It unfortunately means that I end up sounding like a cynic most of the time, because I am naturally skeptical about every statistic I hear. One gets used to the fact that most stats you see are poorly measured, poorly presented, poorly collected, or poorly contexted. I actually play a game with my kids (because I want them to be shunned as sad, cynical people as well) that I call “what could be wrong with that statistic.” In this game, they have to come up with reasons that the claimed implication of some statistic is misleading because of some detail that the person showing the chart hasn’t mentioned (not necessarily nefariously; most users of statistics simply don’t understand).
But mostly, bad statistics are harmless. I have it on good authority that 85% of all statistics are made up, including that one, and another 12.223% are presented with false precision, including that one. As a result, the only statistic that anyone believes completely is the one they are citing themselves. So, normally, I just roll my eyes and move on.
Some statistics, though, because they are widely distributed or widely re-distributed and have dramatic implications and are associated with a draconian prescription for action, deserve special scrutiny. I saw one of these recently, and it is reproduced below (original source is Ray Dalio, who really ought to know better, although I got it from John Mauldin’s Thoughts from the Frontline).
Now, Mr. Dalio is not the first person to lament how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, or some version of the socialist lament. Thomas Piketty wrote an entire book based on bad statistics and baseless assertions, after all. I don’t have time to tackle an entire book, and anyway such a work automatically attracts its own swarm of critics. But Mr. Dalio is widely respected/feared, and as such a simple chart from him carries the anti-capitalist message a lot further.[1]
I quickly identified at least four problems with this chart. One of them is just persnickety: the axis obviously should be in log scale, since we care about the percentage deviation and not the dollar deviation. But that is relatively minor. Here are three others:
- I suspect that over the time frame covered by this chart, the average age of the people in the top group has increased relative to the average age of the people in the bottom group. In any income distribution, the top end tends to be more populated with older people than the bottom end, since younger people tend to start out being lower-paid. Ergo, the bottom rung consists of both young people, and of older people who haven’t advanced, while the top rung is mostly older people who have Since society as a whole is older now than it was in the 1970s, it is likely that the average age of the top earners has risen by more than the average age of the bottom earners. But that means the comparison has changed since the people at the top now have more time to earn, relative to the bottom rung, than they did before. Dalio lessens this effect a little bit by choosing 35-to-64-year-olds, so new graduates are not in the mix, but the point is valid.
- If your point is that the super-wealthy are even more super-wealthier than they were before, that the CEO makes a bigger multiple of the line worker’s salary than before, then the 40th percentile versus 60th percentile would be a bad way to measure it. So I assume that is not Dalio’s point but rather than there is generally greater dispersion to real earnings than there was before. If that is the argument, then you don’t really want the 40th versus the 60th percentile either. You want the bottom 40% versus the top 40 percent except for the top 1%. That’s because the bottom of the distribution is bounded by zero (actually by something above zero since this chart only shows “earners”) and the top of the chart has no bound. As a result, the upper end can be significantly impacted by the length of the upper tail. So if the top 1%, which used to be centi-millionaires, are now centi-billionaires, that will make the entire top 40% line move higher…which isn’t fair if the argument is that the top group (but not the tippy-top group, which we all agree are in a category by themselves) is improving its lot more than the bottom group. As with point 1., this will tend to exaggerate the spread. I don’t know how much, but I know the direction.
- This one is the most insidious because it will occur to almost nobody except for an inflation geek. The chart shows “real household income,” which is nominal income (in current dollars) deflated by a price index (presumably CPI). Here is the issue: is it fair to use the same price index to deflate the incomes of the top 40% as we use to deflate the income of the bottom 40%? I would argue that it isn’t, because they have different consumption baskets (and more and more different, as you go higher and higher up the income ladder). If the folks at the top are making more money, but their cost of living is also going up faster, then using the average cost of living increase to deflate both baskets will exaggerate how much better the high-earners are doing than the low-earners. This is potentially a very large effect over this long a time frame. Consider just two categories: food, and shelter. The weights in the CPI tell us that on average, Americans spend about 13% of their income on food and 33% on shelter (these percentages of course shift over time; these are current weights). I suspect that very low earners spend a higher proportion of their budget on food than 13%…probably also more than 33% on shelter, but I suspect that their expenditures are more heavily-weighted towards food than 1:3. But food prices in real terms (deflated by the CPI) are basically unchanged over the last 50 years, while real shelter prices are up about 37%. So, if I am right about the relative expenditure weights of low-earners compared to high-earners, the ‘high-earner’ food/shelter consumption basket has risen by more than the ‘low-earner’ food/shelter consumption basket. Moreover, I think that there are a lot of categories that low-earners essentially consume zero of, or very small amounts of, which have risen in price substantially. Tuition springs to mind. Below I show a chart of CPI-Food, CPI-Shelter, and CPI-College Tuition and Fees, deflated by the general CPI in each case.
The point being that if you look only at incomes, then you are getting an impression from Dalio’s chart – even if my objection #1 and #2 are unimportant – that the lifestyles of the top 40% are improving by lots more than the lifestyles of the bottom 40%. But there is an implicit assumption that these two groups consume the same things, or that the prices of their relative lifestyles are changing similarly. I think that would be a hard argument. What should happen to this chart, then, is that each of these lines should be deflated by a price index appropriate to that group. We would find that the lines, again, would be closer together.
None of these objections means that there isn’t a growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots in our country. My point is simply that the disparity, and moreover the change in the disparity, is almost certainly less than it is generally purported to be with the weakly-assembled statistics we are presented with.
[1] Mr. Mauldin gamely tried to object, but the best he could do was say that capitalists aren’t good at figuring out how to share the wealth. Of course, this isn’t a function of capitalists. The people who decide how to distribute the wealth in capitalism are the consumers, who vote with their dollars. Bill Gates is not uber-rich because he decided to keep hundreds of billions of dollars away from the huddling masses; he is uber-rich because consumers decided to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for what he provided.
Tariffs are Good for Inflation
The news of the day today – at least, from the standpoint of someone interested in inflation and inflation markets – was President Trump’s announcement of a new tariff on Canadian lumber. The new tariff, which is a response to Canada’s “alleged” subsidization of sales of lumber to the US (“alleged,” even though it is common knowledge that this occurs and has occurred for many years), ran from 3% to 24% on specific companies where the US had information on the precise subsidy they were receiving, and 20% on other Canadian lumber companies.
In related news, lumber is an important input to homebuilding. Several home price indicators were out today: the FHA House Price Index for new purchases was up 6.43% y/y, the highest level in a while (see chart, source Bloomberg).
The Case-Shiller home price index, which is a better index than the FHA index, showed the same thing (see chart, source Bloomberg). The first bump in home price growth, in 2012 and 2013, was due to a rebound to the sharp drop in home prices during the credit crisis. But this latest turn higher cannot be due to the same factor, since home prices have nearly regained all the ground that they lost in 2007-2012.
Those price increases are in the prices of existing homes, of course, but I wanted to illustrate that, even without new increases in materials costs, housing costs were continuing to rise faster than incomes and faster than prices generally. But now, the price of new homes will also rise due to this tariff (unless the market is slack and so builders have to absorb the cost increase, which seems unlikely to happen). Thus, any ebbing in core inflation that we may have been expecting as home price inflation leveled off may be delayed somewhat longer.
But the tariff hike is symptomatic of a policy that provokes deeper concern among market participants. As I’ve pointed out previously, de-globalization (aka protectionism) is a significant threat to inflation not just in the United States, but around the world. While I am not worried that most of Trump’s proposals would result in a “reflationary trade” due to strong growth – I am not convinced we have solved the demographic and productivity challenges that keep growth from being strong by prior standards, and anyway growth doesn’t cause inflation – I am very concerned that arresting globalization will. This isn’t all Trump’s fault; he is also a symptom of a sense among workers around the world that globalization may have gone too far, and with no one around who can eloquently extol the virtues of free trade, tensions were likely to rise no matter who occupied the White House. But he is certainly accelerating the process.
Not only do inflation markets understand this, it is right now one of the most-significant things affecting levels in inflation markets. Consider the chart below, which compares 10-year breakeven inflation (the difference between 10-year Treasuries and 10-year TIPS) to the frequency of “Border Adjustment Tax” as a search term in news stories on Google.
The market clearly anticipated the Trumpflation issue, but as the concern about BAT declined so did breakevens. Until today, when 10-year breakevens jumped 5-6bps on the Canadian tariff story.
At roughly 2%, breakevens appear to be discounting an expectation that the Fed will fail to achieve its price inflation target of 2% on PCE (which would be about 2.25% on CPI), and also excluding the value of any “tail outcomes” from protectionist battles. When growth flags, I expect breakevens will as well – and they are of course not as cheap as they were last year (by some 60-70bps). But from a purely clinical perspective, it is still hard to see how TIPS can be perceived as terribly rich here, at least relative to nominal Treasury bonds.
Profits and Health Care: A Beneficial Connection
I usually try to avoid political commentary in this space, because it has become so personal to so many people. If I point out that a particular program of the “left” is smart, or cleverly put together, then half of my readership is annoyed; if I point out the same about the right, then half of my readership is angry. It doesn’t really make sense to waste article space except on those occasions when a policy has a clear effect on inflation over time, such as when the structure of the ACA made it clear that it would put upward pressure on inflation (as I pointed out in 2013) or in response to someone else’s flawed analysis of a policy, as I did last year when I tackled the San Francisco Fed for their weak argument about how the ACA would hold down inflation because the government would demand lower prices. Actually, there is no policy I have written about more than the ACA over the years – but again, this was economic commentary and not political commentary.
This article will be short, but different in that I am writing it to express frustration with the absolute lack of intellectual clarity on the part of the Republicans in making a particular argument that immediately impacts the debate over health care but also extends far into other policies. And, because the argument is simple, direct, and has tremendous empirical support, I couldn’t restrain myself. I expect this article will not be picked up and syndicated in its usual channels since it isn’t directly about economics or markets, but it needed to be said.
I’ve been stewing about this topic since Tuesday (March 14th), when I happened to catch part of the daily White House press briefing. Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked a question about the President’s health care proposal, and tap danced away from the question:
Q Thanks, Sean. You mentioned the call with the CEO of Anthem Health. Can you tell me what this proposal of the President means for health insurance companies? Will their profits go up or down under the President’s proposal?
SPICER: Well, I don’t think that’s been the focus of the President’s proposal. It’s not about them, it’s about patients. But I think what it means for them is that they finally get to create more choice and more plans and allow people to choose a plan that fits them. Right now, they don’t have that choice. And, frankly, in more and more markets, companies like Anthem, UnitedHealth, Signa are pulling out — Aetna — because they don’t have the choice and because of the government mandate. I think what we want to do is allow competition and choice to exist so that they can offer more options for the American people.
Q But will those companies make more money under the President’s plan or less?
SPICER: I don’t know the answer to that. That’s not been the focus of what we’re doing now. And at the end of the day, right now they’re pulling out of market after market, leaving the American people with fewer and fewer choices. So right now it’s not a question of — from the last I checked, I think many of them were doing pretty well, but it’s the American people and its patients that are losing under the current system. So I think that there’s a way you can do a little of both.
Spicer’s response was the usual drivel that the Republicans have adopted when they run in fear from any question that includes the word “profits.” To summarize, the question was basically, “you’re doing this to throw a sop to fat-cat insurance companies, aren’t you?” and the answer was “we don’t think about that. No idea. Profits? Who said anything about profits? It’s about patients and choice. And, if anyone gets more profits, it wasn’t on purpose and we didn’t have anything to do with it.”
But this was actually a softball question, and the answer ought to have been something like this:
Q But will those companies make more money under the President’s plan or less?
BIZARRO SPICER: Well, I hope so. After all, the insurance companies want every person in America to have health care – which is the same thing that we want – because the more people they sell their product to, the more money they can make. The insurance companies want to sell insurance to every person in the U.S. The insurance companies also want costs to be lower, and constantly strive to lower the cost of care, because the lower that costs are, the more profit they can make in the short run. But they don’t want lower costs at the expense of health – clearly, the best outcome for their profits is that most people covered by insurance are healthy and so don’t require the insurance they’ve paid for. So, if we just get out of the way and let companies strive for better profits, we are likely to get more coverage, lower costs, and a healthier population, and that is the goal of the President’s plan.
The reason we don’t already have these things is that laws we have previously passed don’t allow insurance companies to offer certain plans, to certain people, which both sides want but which politicians think are “unfair” for one reason or another. Trying to create a certain preconceived Utopian outcome while limiting profits of insurance companies is what caused this mess in the first place.
If you want to beautify gardens in this city, does it make sense to limit the amount of money that gardeners can make? If you did, you would find fewer gardens got tended, and gardeners would not strive to make improvements that they didn’t get paid for. We can see this clearly with gardeners. Why is it so hard to understand with the companies that tend to the nation’s health? Next question.
For some reason, Republicans think that saying “profits are good” is the same thing as saying “greed is good” and leads to caricatures of conservatives as cigar-smoking industrialists. But while at some level it is the desire for a better material outcome – which I suppose is greed, but aren’t there degrees of greed? – that drives the desire for profit, we cannot dismiss the power of self-interest as a motive force that has the effect of improving societal outcomes. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” after all.
Of course, Republicans must also remember that profit without competition is a different animal. If an insurance company creates an innovation that lowers medical care costs, but does not face competitive pressure, then the benefit of the innovation accrues to the company alone. There is no pressure in such circumstances for the company to lower the price to the customer. But consider what happened to air fares after the deregulation of 1978, or to the cost of telephone service when the AT&T monopoly was broken up in 1984, as competition was allowed and even encouraged. Competition, and the more brutal the better, is what causes companies to strive for an edge through innovation, and it’s also what causes the benefit of that edge to eventually be accrued by the end customer. The government didn’t invent cell phones. Motorola did, in order to try and gain an edge against AT&T,[1] but until the telephone monopoly was broken up there were no commercial versions of the cell phone. The first cell phones cost $10,000 in 1983, about $25,000 in today’s dollars, but now they are ubiquitous and cost about 2% as much in real terms. But this didn’t happen because of a government program to drive down the cost of cell phones. It was the profit motive, combined with competition. All that government did was create the conditions that allowed innovation and competition to happen. And wouldn’t we like health care to be as ubiquitous and cheap as cell phones are?
This is not a hard thing to get right. It isn’t hard for people to understand. But for some reason, it seems incredibly hard for politicians to believe.
Note that nothing I have written here should be construed as an opinion about the President’s health care plan, which I have not read. My remarks are only meant to reflect on the utter inability of Republicans to properly convey the reasons that a different approach – one where the government’s involvement is lessened, rather than increased – would make more sense.
[1] The first cell phone call was made by the inventor, Martin Cooper at Motorola, who called his competition with it: the head of the cellular program at AT&T. According to him, he said “Joel, I’m calling you from a cellular phone, a real cellular phone, a handheld, portable, real cellular phone” and he said it got really quiet on the other end of the line.
Can’t Blame Trump for Everything
So much has happened since the Presidential election – and almost none of it very obvious.
The plunge in equities on Donald Trump’s victory was foreseeable. The bounce was also foreseeable. The fact that the bounce completely reversed the selloff and took the market to within a whisker of new all-time highs was not, in my mind, an easy prediction. I understand that Mr. Trump intends to lower corporate tax rates (and he should, since it is human beings – owners, customers, and employees – that end up paying those taxes; taxing a company is just a way to hide the fact that more taxes are being layered on those human beings). And I understand that lowering the corporate tax rate, if it happens, is generally positive for corporate entities and the people who own them. I’m even willing to concede that, since Mr. Trump is – no matter what his faults – certainly more capitalism-friendly than his opponent, his election might be generally positive for equity values.
But the problem is that equities are already, to put it generously, “fully valued” for very good outcomes with Shiller multiples that are near the highest ever recorded.
I think that investors tend to misunderstand the role that valuation plays when investing in public equities. Consider what has happened to the economy over the last eight years under President Obama: if you had known in 2008 that growth would be anemic, debt would balloon, government regulation would increase dramatically, taxes would increase, and a new universal medical entitlement would be lashed to the backs of the American taxpayer/consumer/investor, would you have invested heavily in equities? Yet all stocks did was triple. The reason they did so was that they started from fairly low multiples and went to extremely high multiples. This was not unrelated to the fact that the Fed took trillions of dollars of safe securities out of the market, forcing investors (through the “Portfolio Balance Channel”) into risky securities. By analogy, might stocks decline over the next four years even if the business climate is more agreeable? You betcha – and, starting from these levels, that’s not terribly unlikely.
I am less surprised with the selloff in global bond markets, and not really surprised much at all with the rally in inflation breakevens. As I’ve said for a long time, fixed-income is so horribly mispriced that you should only hold bonds if you must hold bonds, and then you should only hold TIPS given how cheap they were. Because of their sharp outperformance, 10-year TIPS are now only about 40-50bps cheap compared to nominal bonds (as opposed to 110 or so earlier this year), and so it’s a much closer call. They are not relatively as cheap as they were, but they are absolutely less expensive as real rates have risen. 10-year real rates at 0.37% aren’t anything to write home about, but that is the highest yield since March.
Some analysis I have seen attributes the large increase in market-based measures of inflation expectations on Mr. Trump’s victory. For example, 10-year breakevens have risen 20bps, from about 1.70% to about 1.90%, since Mr. Trump sealed the win (see chart, source Bloomberg).
I think we have to be careful about blaming/crediting Mr. Trump for everything. While breakevens rose in the aftermath of the election, you can see that they were rising steadily before the election as well, when everyone thought Hillary Clinton was a sure thing. Moreover, breakevens didn’t just rise in the US, but globally. That’s a very strange reaction if it is simply due to the victory of one political party in the US over another. It is not unreasonable to think that some rise in global inflation might happen, if Trump is bad for global trade…but that’s a pretty big reach, and something that wouldn’t happen for some time in any event.
In my view, the rise in global inflation markets is easy to explain without resorting to Trump. As the previous chart illustrates, it has been happening for a while already. And it has been happening because global inflation itself is rising (although a lot of that at the moment is optics, since the prior collapse of energy prices is starting to fall out of the year-over-year figures).
The bond market and the inflation market are acting, actually, like the Great Unwind was kicked off by the election of Donald Trump. We all know what the Great Unwind is, right? It’s when the imbalances created and nurtured by global central banks and fiscal authorities over the last couple of decades – but especially in the last eight years – are unwound and conditions return to normal. But if pushing those imbalances had a soothing, narcotic effect on markets, we all suspect that removing them will be the opposite. Higher rates and inflation and more volatility are the obvious outcomes.
Equity investors don’t seem to fear the Great Unwind, even though stock multiples are one of the clearest beneficiaries of government largesse over the last eight years. As mentioned above, I can see the argument for better business conditions, even though margins are still very wide. But I’m skeptical that better business conditions can overcome the headwinds posed by higher rates and inflation. Still, that’s what equity investors are believing at the moment.
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A couple of administrative announcements about upcoming (free!) webinars:
On Thursday, November 17th (aka CPI Day), I will be doing a live webinar at 9:00ET talking about the CPI report and putting it in context. You can register for that webinar, and the ensuing Q&A session, here. After the presentation, a recording will be available on TalkMarkets.
On consecutive Mondays spanning November 28, December 5, and December 12, at 11:00ET, I will be doing a series of one-hour educational seminars on inflation. The first is “How Inflation Works;” the second is “Inflation and Asset Classes;” and the third is “Inflation-aware Investing.” These webinars will also have live Q&A. After each session, a recording will be available on Investing.com.
Each of these webinars is financially sponsored by Enduring Investments.
