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Twits and Brits
I want to talk today about some of the really important pieces of information that circulated this weekend. First, I am certain that everyone is familiar with the following chart, which made the rounds after the Brexit vote. It shows an enormous surge in the search term “What is the EU” after the Brexit vote was completed:
This chart, or something very much like it, was all over the place. Oh, wait! I just realized that I forgot to put the axes on the chart! Here it is with a few more relevant pieces of information – incidentally the same information that was left off the original chart. It turns out that it wasn’t the chart I thought it was. Sorry about that…they looked the same.
(For the record, after an extended period of indolence, on Thursday I went for a run; on Friday I went for a run before putting on any other shoes first; on Saturday I went for a run and then later put on different shoes to go to a cocktail party.)
Is it too much to ask that people seeking to insult the British voters at least put some effort into their attempt? Ignore for a moment the simple fact that we don’t know who was searching this – it might well have been the people who voted to Remain, after all – and so the story line that the people who voted Leave were just morons gets no support from this chart. It also turns out that this was the second-most-searched term only for one small time segment: early in the morning after the vote. By 5am it was eclipsed by questions about the weather. Oh my – it seems the Britons also don’t know what weather is! Also, as the Telegraph’s skeptical story (linked above) points out, the raw number of people asking the question was only on the order of 1,000 – it was just a massive increase since it hadn’t been previously asked very much. This is where not having axes matters…it turns out this is a non-story, and nonsense.
Another piece of nonsense I want to point out is more general. I have seen several Twitter polls and other polls in something like this form:
Q: What effect do you think that Brexit will have on the global economy?
a) Deeply contractionary
b) Moderately contractionary
c) Somewhat contractionary
d) Expansionary
Now this is nonsense because the actual result not only has nothing to do with opinion, it’s not even clear why we would care about people’s opinion in this case (unless we are trying to show how pervasive the negative news stories are, or something). Polls work comparatively well when there is not a lot of information inequality – for example, when each person is asked about his or her own vote. But the poll above is analogous to this poll:
I submit that only me, and my valet, have the information sought by this poll; all other respondents have zero information. Therefore…what’s the value of the poll? Unless I or my valet are respondents, precisely zero; if we are, then the value is inverse to the number of other respondents diluting the response of the people who know.
Similarly, there is likely some information asymmetry among respondents to the poll about the effect of Brexit on the global economy. I would respectfully suggest that most people who are responding are saying what they have heard, or what they fear, or what they hope, while some people – macroeconomists, for example – might have actual models. To be sure, those models are probably only slightly better than the fearful and hopeful assumptions put into them, but the point is that this poll is nonsense in the same way that polling people about what they expect inflation next year to be is nonsense. The vast majority of respondents have no way to evaluate the question in a structured way, so what you are capturing is no more and no less than what people are worried about, which is itself just a reflection of what they’re seeing and hearing…for example, on Twitter.
(For what it’s worth, I think that thanks to the weakening of sterling Brexit is likely to be mildly stimulative to the UK economy, as well as somewhat inflationary, and slightly contractionary and disinflationary to the rest of the world. But the question about global effects is a trick question. Obviously, global production and consumption are unlikely to change much in real terms just due to the arrangement of trade flows. More friction in the system to the extent that Europe puts up significant trade barriers against the UK – something I don’t view as terribly likely – will lower global output slightly and raise global prices.)
These flash polls and Google trends data are part and parcel of the Twitterization of discourse. They have in common the fact that they can be snapshot and draw eyeballs and clicks, whether or not there is any content to the observations. In these cases, and in many others, there isn’t.
Here’s a thought: why don’t we wait a few months, or better yet a few years, before we judge the impact of Brexit? Sometimes, having actual data is even better than a Twitter poll.
Britain Survived the Blitz and Will Survive Brexit
So I see today that former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan says this is the worst crisis he has seen. Bigger than the 1987 Crash? Bigger than Long Term Capital? Bigger than the internet bubble collapse? Bigger than the Lehman (et. al.) collapse? Really?
As humans, we tend to have short memories and (ridiculously) short planning horizons. Greenspan, especially in his apparent dotage, has a shorter memory even than he had previously – maybe this is convenient given his record. I don’t want to comment on his planning horizon as that would seem uncharitable.
Why is Brexit bad? The trade arrangements and treaties do not suddenly become invalid simply because the UK has voted to throw off the shackles of her overlords and return to being governed by the same rules they’ve been governed by basically since the Magna Carta. But Jim Bianco crystallized the issue for me this week. He pointed out that while Brussels could let this be a mostly painless transition, it has every incentive to make it as painful as possible. In Jim’s words, “if it isn’t painful then hands shoot up all over Europe to be the next to leave.” That’s an astute political observation, and I think he’s right. The EU will work hard to punish Britain for having the temerity to demand sovereignty.
But Britain survived the Blitz; they will survive Brexit.
Indeed, Britain will survive longer than the Euro. The sun is beginning to set on that experiment. The first cracks happened a few years ago with Greece, but the implausibility of a union of political and economic interests when the national interests diverge was a problem from the first Maastricht vote. Who is next? Will it be Greece, Spain, Italy, or maybe France where the anti-EU sentiment is higher even than it is in the UK? The only questions now are the timing of the exits (is it months, or years?) and the order of the exits.
As I said, as humans we not only have short memories but short planning horizons. From a horizon of 5 or 10 years, is it going to turn out that Brexit was a total disaster, leading to a drastically different standard of living in the UK? I can’t imagine that is the case – the 2008 crisis has had an effect on lifestyles, but only because of the scale and scope of central bank policy errors. In Iceland, which addressed the imbalances head-on, life recovered surprisingly quickly.
These are all political questions. The financial questions are in some sense more fascinating, and moreover feed our tendency to focus on the short term.
A lot of money was wagered over the last few weeks on what was a 52-48 proposition the whole way. The betting markets were skewed because of assumptions about how undecideds would break, but it was never far from a tossup in actual polling (and now perhaps we will return to taking polling with the grain of salt it is usually served with). Markets are reacting modestly violently today – at this writing, the US stock market is only -2.5% or so, which is hardly a calamity, but bourses in Europe are in considerably worse shape of course – and this should maybe be surprising with a 52-48 outcome. I like to use the Kelly Criterion framework as a useful way to think about how much to tilt investments given a particular set of circumstances.
Kelly says that your bet size should depend on your edge (the chance of winning) and your odds (the payoff, given success or failure). Going into this vote, betting on Remain had a narrow edge (52-48) and awful odds (if Remain won, the payoff was pretty small since it was mostly priced in). Kelly would say this means you should have a very small bet on, if you want to bet that outcome. If you want to bet the Leave outcome, your edge was negative but your odds were much better, so perhaps somewhat larger of a bet on Brexit than on Bremain was warranted. But that’s not the way the money flowed, evidently.
Not to worry: this morning Janet Yellen said (with the market down 2.5%) that the Fed stood ready to add liquidity if needed. After 2.5%? In 1995 she would have had to come out and say that every week or two. A 2.5% decline takes us back to last week’s lows. Oh, the humanity!
Just stop. The purpose of markets is to move risk from people who have it to people who want it. If, all of a sudden, lots of people seem to have too much risk and to want less, then perhaps it is because they were encouraged into taking too much risk, or encouraged to think of the risk as being less than it was. I wonder how that happened? Oh, right: that’s what the Fed called the “portfolio balance channel” – by removing less-risky assets, they forced investors to hold more-risky assets since those assets now constitute a larger portion of the float. In my opinion (and this will not happen soon), central banks might consider letting markets allocate risk between the people who want it and the people who don’t want it, at fair prices. Just a suggestion.
One final point to be made today. I have seen people draw comparisons between this episode and other historical episodes. This is refreshing, since it reflects at least some thoughtful attempt to remember history. Not all of these are apt or useful comparisons; I saw one that this is the “Archduke Ferdinand” moment of this generation and that’s just nuts. Europe is not a military powderkeg at the moment and war in Europe is not about to begin. But, to the extent that trade barriers begin to rise again, the idea that this may be a “Smoot-Hawley” moment is worth consideration. The Smoot-Hawley tariff is generally thought to have added the “Great” to the phrase “Great Depression.” I think that’s probably overstating the importance of this event – especially if everybody decides to respect Britons’ decision and try to continue trade as usual – but it’s the right idea. What I want to point out is that while rising tariffs tend to produce lower growth and lower potential growth, they also tend to produce higher inflation. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of Eastern Europe is one big reason that inflation outcomes over the last few decades have been lower than we would have expected for the amount of money growth we have had. The US has gone from producing all of its own apparel to producing almost none, for example, and this is a disinflationary influence. What would happen to apparel prices if the US changed its mind and started producing it all domestically again? Give that some thought, and realize that’s the protectionist part of the Brexit argument.
We can cheer for a victory for independence and freedom, while continuing to fight against any tendency towards economic isolationism. But I worry about the latter. It will mean higher inflation going forward, even if the doomsayers are right and we also get lower growth from Brexit and the knock-on effects of Brexit.
Fed Nonsense and Error Bars
Today’s news was the Employment number. I am not going to talk a lot about the number, since the January jobs number is one of those releases where the seasonal adjustments totally swamp the actual data, and so it has even wider-than-normal error bars. I will discuss error bars more in a moment, but first here is something I do want to point out about the Employment figure. Average Hourly Earnings are now clearly rising. The latest year-on-year number was 2.5%, well above consensus estimates, and last month’s release was revised to 2.7%. So now, the chart of wage growth looks like this.
Of course, I always point out that wages follow inflation, rather than leading it, but since so many people obsess about the wrong inflation metric this may not be readily apparent. But here is Average Hourly Earnings, y/y, versus Median CPI. I have shown this chart before.
The salient point is that whether you are looking at core CPI or PCE or Median CPI, and whether you think wages lead prices or follow prices, this number significantly increases the odds that the Fed raises rates again. Yes, there are lots of reasons the Fed’s intended multi-year tightening campaign is unlikely to unfold, and I am one of those who think that they may already be regretting the first one. But a number like this will tend to convince the hawks among them otherwise.
Speaking of the Fed, last night I attended a speech by Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester, sponsored by Market News International. Every time I hear a Fed speaker speak, afterwards I want to put my head into a vise to squeeze all of the nonsense out – and last night was no different. Now, Dr. Mester is a classically-trained, highly-accomplished economist with a Ph.D. from Princeton, but I don’t hold that against her. Indeed, credit where credit is due: unlike many such speakers I have heard in the past, Dr. Mester seemed to put more error bars around some of her answers and, in one of the best exchanges, she observed that we won’t really know whether the QE tool is worth keeping in the toolkit until after monetary conditions have returned to normal. That’s unusual; most Fed speakers have long been declaring victory. She is certainly a fan and an advocate of QE, but at least recognizes that the chapter on QE cannot yet be written (although I make what I think is a fair attempt at such a chapter in my book, due out in a month or so).
But the problem with the Federal Reserve boils down to two things. First, like any large institution there is massive groupthink going on. There is little true and significant diversity of opinion. For example there are, for all intents and purposes, no true monetarists left at the Fed who have any voice. Daniel Thornton at the St. Louis Fed was the last one who ever published pieces expressing the important role of money in monetary policy, and he retired a little while back. As another example, it is taken as a given that “transparency” is a good thing, despite the fact that many of the questions posed last night to Dr. Mester boiled down to problems that are actually due to too much transparency. I doubt seriously whether there has ever been a formal discussion, internally, of the connection between increased financial leverage and increased Fed transparency. Many of the problems with “too big to fail” institutions boil down to too much leverage, and a transparent Fed that carefully telegraphs its intentions will tend to increase investor confidence in outcomes and, hence, tend to increase leverage. But I cannot imagine that anyone at the Fed has ever seriously raised the question whether they should be giving less, rather than more, information to the market. It is significantly outside of chapter-and-verse.
The second problem is that the denizens of the Fed overestimate their knowledge and their ability to know certain things that may simply not be knowable. Again, Dr. Mester was a mild exception to this – but very mild. When someone says “We think the overnight rate should normalize more slowly than implied by the Taylor Rule,” but then doesn’t follow that up with an explanation of why you think so, I grow wary. Because economics in the real world, practiced honestly, should produce a lot of “I don’t know” answers. It may be boring, but this is how the question-and-answer with Dr. Mester should have gone:
Q: What do you think inflation will do in 2016?
A: I don’t know. I can tell you my point estimate, but it has really wide error bars.
Q: What do you think short rates will do in 2016?
A: I don’t know. I can tell you my point estimate, but it has really wide error bars.
Q: What do you think the Unemployment Rate will do in 2016?
A: I don’t know. I can tell you my point estimate, but it has really wide error bars.
Q: What do you think the Unemployment Rate will do in 2017?
A: I don’t know. I can tell you my point estimate, but it has really, really wide error bars.
Q: What do you think the consensus is at the Fed about the optimal pace of raising rates?
A: I don’t know. Each person on the Committee has a point estimate, each of which has really wide error bars. Collectively, we have an average that has even wider error bars. We cannot therefore usefully characterize what the path of the short rate will look like. At all.
Indeed, this is part of the problem with transparency. If you are going to be transparent, there is going to be pressure to provide “answers.” But a forecast without an error bar is just a guess. The error bars are what cause a guess to become an estimate. So we get a “dot plot” with a bunch of guesses on it. The actual dot plot, from December, looks like this:
But the dot plot should look more like this, where the error bars are all included.
Obviously, we would take the latter chart as meaning…correctly…that the Fed really has very little idea of where the funds rate is going to be in a couple of years and cannot convincingly reject the hypothesis that rates will be basically unchanged from here. That’s simultaneously transparent, and very informational, and colossally unhelpful to fast-twitch traders.
And now I can release the vise on my head. Thank you for letting me get the nonsense out.
Time to Retire the 20% Bull/Bear Market Rule
Officially, Crude Oil has had the worst bull market ever.
According to a headline on Bloomberg on Monday, Crude is in a bull market. The headline screamed “WTI CRUDE CLOSES UP 29% FROM AUG 24 LOW, ENTERS BULL MARKET”! On Tuesday, after a 7.7% fall from Monday’s close (-100%, annualized), the bull market doesn’t seem so…well, ebullient.
Okay, sure, this is a pet peave of mine. I don’t know whose idea it was to call a 20% advance from the prior low a bull market, and a 20% decline from the prior high a bear market, but I am pretty sure that they didn’t intend for that 20% to be applied to all markets, at all times. So a 5-year Treasury Note is not in a bear market until it falls 20 points (or…is that 20% of the current yield? I guess it depends who writes the headlines!), but energy futures which can move 20% in a couple of days, or corn futures which can double literally overnight if there is a drought, can be in bull and bear markets a couple of times per month. Does this make sense?
Add to this the obvious absurdity of the idea that we can know in advance whether an asset is in a bull or bear market. If you are telling me that Crude rallying 20% off the lows means that it is in a bull market, and that means I can be long Crude comfortably, knowing it is likely to rally from here – then you need to quit telling me anything and go make a fortune trading.
We can only know a bull market or a bear market in hindsight. That is, even if 20% is the magic number (and I can’t think of why that would be so), the best we can say is that Crude was in a bull market on Thursday, Friday, and Monday when it rallied about 27%. Does that help us, going into Tuesday?
Evidently not!
That’s Not How Any of This Works
I wonder how many times the Fed needs to be more dovish than expected before investors realize that this is a dovish Fed?
It may indeed be the most dovish Fed ever, judging from Dr. Yellen’s prior statements and history. And yet, investors seemed to have convinced themselves that with core inflation measured in the Fed’s preferred way far below its target (to be sure, it’s not the right way to measure it, but they’re not looking for excuses to hike), with structural unemployment still high (see chart of “Not in Labor Force, Want a Job Now,” source Bloomberg, below), with other central banks aggressively easing so that our dollar is aggressively strengthening, and with recent economic indicators surprising on the low side at the most-rapid pace since 2011, the Fed was going to put itself on a track to start hiking rates by early summer.
In the event, the Fed told us that they are no longer going to be automatically “patient” – which was the word that 90% of economists expected them to remove from the statement – but the Committee’s median projections for the year-end Fed funds rate dropped 50bps since the last meeting, to just above 0.5%.
Why won’t investors listen? It isn’t as if the last Fed Chairman was a renowned hawk. It’s been a generation since we had a real hawk in the Chairman’s seat. So I have no idea why it is a shock to people that the Fed acts dovishly, even as Chairman Yellen says the Fed will need to “monitor inflation developments carefully.”
If they were monitoring inflation developments carefully, they would know that median inflation is already at levels that represent achievement of the Fed’s target. If they were monitoring inflation developments carefully, then they would know that the dollar (which Yellen says will keep inflation lower for longer) has very little impact on domestic pricing, outside of goods that are largely produced overseas (apparel) or certain raw commodities (like energies).
Or, perhaps, just perhaps…they actually do know these things, but prefer to rely on obfuscation to keep rates as low as they can for as long as they can, until the market absolutely demands that they raise them. With market interest rates low, and the dollar strong, there is absolutely no market pressure for the FOMC to raise rates. Therefore, they will not.
At this writing, 10-year breakevens are +11bps on the day. Over the last week or two, after a mild bounce from the beaten-down lows, fast money had been leaning on breakevens again and pushing them inexorably lower. How do I know it was fast money? Because 10-year breakevens are up 11bps in a freaking hour, after a mild adjustment in the “dots.” That isn’t the sort of move that reflects long-term planning.
I continue to be flabbergasted at how the Fed maintains its credibility. We all know that the Fed has been considerably worse than the average economic forecaster over a long period of time. But it even seems to have trouble with current data. On the tape right now, the Chairman is saying that the “residual effects” of the financial crisis are restraining credit. Really? The chart below shows commercial bank credit. Does that look restrained to you? It is rising at better than an 8% pace y/y, the fastest level since May 2008. And it’s 10%-11% annualized on a q/q basis.
Sometimes I want to echo that commercial for Esurance. “That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.”
When market rates go higher, and/or the dollar weakens because our domestic inflation starts being appreciably more than that of our trading partners, then the Fed will get serious about tightening. But it will have to be serious enough to handle the downward adjustment in securities prices that will happen when they begin to do so. I can’t foresee a time when that’s particularly likely. The Fed eschewed tightening over the last few years with an economy that had good momentum (see the first chart above). How likely is it that the Fed will get ambitious about hiking rates in the late stages of an expansion that is long in the tooth? With this Chairman? I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Swiss Jeez
The focus over the last few days has clearly been central bank follies. In just the last week:
- The Swiss National Bank (SNB) abruptly stopped trying to hold down the Swiss Franc from rising against the Euro; the currency immediately rose 20% against the continental currency (see chart, source Bloomberg). More on this below.
- The ECB, widely expected to announce the beginnings of QE tomorrow (Jan 22nd), have quietly mooted about the notion of buying approximately €600bln per year, focused on sovereign bonds, and lasting for a minimum of one year. This is greater than most analysts had been expecting, and somewhat open-ended to boot.
- The Bank of Canada announced today a surprise cut in interest rates, because of the decline in oil prices. Unlike the U.S., which would see an oil decline as stimulative and therefore something the central bank would be more inclined to lean against, Canada’s exports are significantly more concentrated in oil so they will tend to respond more directly to disinflation caused by oil prices. This explains the very high correlation between oil prices and the Canadian Dollar (see chart below, source Bloomberg).
Back to the SNB: the 20% spike in the currency provoked an immediate 14% plunge in the Swiss Market Index, and after a few days of volatility the market there is still flirting with those spike lows. The Swiss economy will shortly be back in deflation; the SNB’s addition of vast amounts of Swiss Francs to the monetary system had in recent months caused core inflation in Switzerland to reach the highest levels since 2011: 0.3% (see chart, source Bloomberg).
The good news for Europe, of course, is that the reversal will cause a small amount of inflation in the Eurozone – although probably not enough to notice, at least the sign is right.
Clearly the SNB had identified that trying to keep the Swissy weak while the ECB was about to add hundreds of billions of Euro to the system was a losing battle. In the long history of central bank FX price controls, we see failures more often than successes, especially when the exchange-rate control is trying to repress a natural trend.
But the point of my article today is not to discuss the SNB move nor the effect of it on local or global inflation. The point of my article is to highlight the fact that the sudden movement in the market has caused several currency brokers (including FXCM, Alpari Ltd., and Global Brokers NZ Ltd.) to declare insolvency and at least two hedge funds, COMAC Global Macro Fund and Everest Capital’s Global Fund, to close. More to the point, I want to highlight that fact and ask: what in God’s name were they doing?
Let’s review. In order to lose a lot of money in this trade, you need to be short the Swiss Franc against the Euro. Let’s analyze the potential risks and rewards of this trade. The good news is that the SNB is going your way, adding billions of Swissy to the market. The bad news is that if they win, it is likely to be a begrudging movement in the market – the underlying fundamentals, after all, were heavily the other direction which is why the SNB was forced to intervene – and if they lose, as they ultimately did, it is almost certainly going to be a sudden snap in the other direction since the only major seller of Swiss was exiting. Folks, this is like when a commodity market goes limit-bid, because everyone wants to buy at the market’s maximum allowable move and no one wants to sell. When that market is opened for trading again, it is very likely to continue to move in that direction hard. See the chart below (source: Bloomberg) of one of my favorite examples, the early-1993 rally in Lumber futures after a very strong housing number. The market was limit-up for weeks, most of the time without trading. If you were short, you were carried out.
Of course, there was at least a rationale for being short lumber in early 1993. No one knew that there was about to be a huge housing number. There’s very little rationale to being short Swiss Francs here that I can fathom. This is a classic short-options trade. If you win, you make a tiny amount. If you lose, then you blow up. If you do that with a tiny amount of money, and make lots of small bets that are not only uncorrelated but will be uncorrelated in a crisis (it is unclear how one does this), then it can be a reasonable strategy. But how this is a smart strategy in this case escapes me. And as a broker, I would not allow my margining system to take the incredibly low volatility in the Euro/Swiss cross as a sign that even lower margins are appropriate. VaR here is obviously useless because the distribution of possible returns is not even remotely normal. Again, as a broker I am short options: I might make a tiny amount from customer trading or carry on their cash positions; or I might be left holding the bag when the margin balances held by customers prove to be too little and they walk away.
And I suppose the bottom line is this: you cannot know for certain that your broker or hedge fund manager is being wise about this sort of thing. But you sure as heck need to ask.
Call Off the Deflation Warning
Today’s column is a brief one, as I need to post a correction. Not a correction to my stuff, mind you, but to others.
Pictures like the below have been circulating now for a couple of weeks. This is a chart of the 2-year inflation “breakeven” on Bloomberg, illustrating how a “deflation warning” is sounding as they go negative.
Unfortunately, it ain’t so. I wrote to the authors of the original Bloomberg piece referenced above, and called Bloomberg (more on that later), and figured that when I pointed out that 2-year inflation expectations are nowhere near zero, the story would at least die quietly even if pride prevented a retraction. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened and other “analysts” and news outlets have picked up the story. So, I need to print a correction for them. Unconventional, I know, but I stand for Truth.
The simple fact is that 2-year inflation expectations have fallen deeply, but remain well above zero. The chart below, also from Bloomberg, shows 2-year inflation swaps over the same period. You will notice that it has fallen mightily but remains at about 0.70%.
It turns out that the difference between the Jan-17 TIPS (which have 2 years to maturity) and the Jan-17 nominal Treasuries that are their comparator bond – taking the difference between real and nominal rates gives you the “breakeven” inflation rate that makes them equivalent investments; thus the name – is also about 0.70%.
So why does Bloomberg say the 2-year breakeven is negative? Well, Bloomberg’s “policy” is to track the April-2016 TIPS as the “2-year” TIPS until the new April-2020 TIPS are auctioned in April At that time, they will roll to using the April-2017 TIPS, which will have two years to maturity, and will use that bond for a year. While I applaud Bloomberg for having a policy, that’s no excuse for a stupid policy. There is no place in this universe where the April-16s are a 2-year note. Not even close. And not the “best we can do.”
In truth, especially for short-dated inflation expectations there is no reason not to use inflation swaps. The 2-year inflation swap is evergreen each day with a new 2-year maturity, and there are no idiosyncrasies (such as the fact that the April issues often trade cheap because of the bad seasonality associated with them, so they will usually understate true inflation expectations if you use them) to worry about.
So the story is false. The market is not discounting two years of deflation. Indeed, the reality is quite a bit different. The chart below (source: Enduring Investments – we know stuff like this) shows the 1-year inflation rate, starting 1 year from now (the 1y1y or 1×2 if you like), derived from CPI swaps. While it has come down substantially since the summer, it is not particularly out of line. In fact, it’s pretty much right where core inflation is, which makes sense: the energy spike lower is not going to continue year after year, which means that once it stops then headline inflation will return to the neighborhood of core…unless there’s a rebound in gasoline, of course. But the point is that the best guess of inflation one year from now has little to do with gasoline.
Actually, the even-deeper point is that it is appalling how little general knowledge there is about inflation, and how journalists and even many analysts have scant idea how to get to the real story. (Hint: calling an inflation expert is a good start.)
Hot Button Issue: Rant Warning
We all have our hot button issues. It will not surprise you, probably, to learn that mine involves inflation. For the rant which follows, I apologize.
Reasonable people, smart people, learned people, can disagree on how precisely the Consumer Price Index captures the inflation in consumer prices. And indeed, over the one hundred years that the CPI has been published such disagreements have been played out among academics, politicians, labor leaders, and others. The debates have raged and many changes – some large, some small; some politically-driven, most not – have occurred in how prices have been collected and the index calculated. If you are interested, really interested, in the century-long history of the CPI, you can read a couple of histories here and here.
If someone is not interested in how CPI is calculated, in how and why changes were made in the methodological approach to calculating price change, then that’s fine. But if a person can’t spend the time to learn the very basics of this hundred-year debate, during which changes were made in the CPI with much public input, not in a smoky back room somewhere, then I wonder why such a person would spend time spewing conspiracy theories on the internet about how the CPI doesn’t include food and energy (um…it does), about how the CPI underestimates prices because it doesn’t account for changes in quality and quantity (um…it does), or about how sneaky methodological changes have caused the CPI to be understated by 7% per year for thirty years.
Recently, the CFA Institute’s monthly magazine for CFA Charterholders was duped into accepting an article that brings together some of the dumbest theories into one place. At some level, the article asks the “interesting” question about whether a consumer price index should include asset prices. Interesting, perhaps, but asked-and-answered: assets are not consumer goods but stores of value. If you are not consuming something, then why would you ever expect it to be included in a consumer price index? You might argue that we should include asset prices into some other sort of index that measures price increases. But we already do. They are called asset price indices, and you know them by names like the S&P 500, the NCREIF, and so on.
Worse, the magazine gives a great big stage to the person who has singlehandedly done more to confuse and anger people, to poison the well of knowledge about inflation, and to stir up the conspiracy theorists about inflation, than anyone else in the world – and all because he is selling an ‘analysis’ product to those people. I won’t mention his name here because I don’t want to advertise his product, but he claims that the CPI is understated by “about 7 percentage points each year.”
That this is being published in a magazine of the CFA Institute is almost enough for me to renounce my membership. It is offensively idiotic to claim that the CPI may be understated by 7% per year, and simple math (which CFA Charterholders were once required to be able to perform) can prove that. If inflation has risen at a pace of around 2.5% per year over the last 30 years, it implies the price level has risen about 110% (1.025^30-1). This seems more or less right. But if inflation had really been 9.5% per year, as claimed, then the cost of the average consumption basket would have risen about 1422% (1.095^30-1).
Can that be right? Well, Real Median Household Income, using the CPI to deflate nominal household income, has risen about 13% over the last 30 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Median_US_household_income.png But if we use the 9.5%-per-year CPI number, then real median household income has actually fallen 84%. If this was true, we would be living in absolute Third-World squalor compared to how things were in the salad days of 1984. You don’t have to be an economist to know the difference between a slightly-better standard of living and one in which you can afford 1/6th of what you could previously afford. You just need a brain.
Any person who does even rudimentary research on the CPI – say, visiting http://www.inflationinfo.com and reading some of the hundreds of papers gathered there, or perusing the BLS website, or speaking with an actual inflation expert – cannot possibly think that this guy is anything other than a nut or a shill. It is a tragedy that the CFA Institute would publish such trash, and it tarnishes the CFA Institute brand. Let’s hope they publish an apologetic retraction in the next issue.
I also like to point out, when I am in rant mode over this (and, as an aside, let me thank the tolerant reader for allowing me to rant – this allows me to forever point people to this link when they bring up this guy), that if the CPI=9.5% number is right then you must also believe a bunch of other ridiculous things:
First: MIT is in on the conspiracy. The Billion Prices Project, which uses very different methodology from the BLS, figures inflation to be about the same as the BLS does. (Digressing for a bit, I think it’s also interesting that the BPP index has tracked Median CPI much better than headline CPI over the last year, when headline CPI has been dragged lower by one-off changes in medical care prices).
Second: Consumers consistently underestimate inflation, or else are serially optimistic about how it is likely to decline from 9.5% to something much lower. The University of Michigan survey of year-ahead inflation expectations – and every other consumer survey of inflation expectations – is much closer to reported inflation than to the shill’s numbers (see chart below, source Bloomberg). I’ve written elsewhere about why consumers might perceive slightly higher inflation than really occurs, but I cannot come up with a theory that explains why consumers would always say it’s much lower than what they are in fact seeing. Maybe we’re all stupid except for this guy with the website.
Third, and related to the prior point: Investors who pour money into inflation-indexed bonds must be complete morons, because they are locking up money for ten years at what is “really” -9% real yields (meaning that they are surrendering 62% of the real purchasing power of their wealth, rather than spending it immediately). We don’t see this behavior in countries where it is known that the official index is manipulated. For example, we know that in Argentina the inflation data really is rigged, and in September of last year long-dated inflation-linked bonds in Argentina were showing real yields of more than 20%. In recent months, the government of Argentina has begun to release figures that are much more realistic and real yields have plunged to around 10% as investors are giving the data more credibility. The upshot is that we have bona fide evidence that investors will base their demanded real yields on the difference between the inflation index they are being paid on and the inflation they think they are actually seeing. The fact that we don’t see TIPS real yields around 6% or 7% is evidence that investors are either really stupid, or they believe the CPI is at least approximately right.
Fourth, and related to that point: if inflation has really being running at 9.5%, then every asset is a losing proposition. There is no way to protect yourself against inflation. You’re not really getting wealthy as you ride stocks higher; you’re only losing more slowly. Since there is no asset class that has returned 10% over a long period of time, we are all doomed. The money is all going away. Especially housing, and real goods like hard commodities – there is nothing you can do that is much worse than holding real stuff, which is only going up in price a couple of percent per year over time while inflation is (apparently) ravaging everything we know and love. There is no winning strategy. Of course, the good news is that it turns out that the U.S. government is being extremely fiscally responsible, with the real deficit falling by 5% or more every year. Right.
I really should not let this bother me. It is good for me, as an investor with a brain, when mindless zombie minions follow this guy and do dumb things in the market. But I can’t help it. The Internet could be a tool for great good, allowing people access to accurate, timely information and the opportunity to learn things that they couldn’t otherwise. It allows this author to come into your mailbox, or onto your screen, to try to educate or illuminate or amuse you. But there is also so much detritus, so much rubbish, so much terribly erroneous information out there that does real harm to those who consume it. And perhaps this is why I get so exercised about this issue: I absolutely believe that people have a right to say and to believe whatever they want, no matter how stupid or dangerous. I am simply aghast, and deeply saddened, that so many people are so credulous that they believe what they read, without critical thought of their own. Everyone has a right to his/her opinion, but they are not all equally valid. There is no FDA for the Internet, so snake-oil salesmen run rampant among their eager marks.
I want my readers to think. If you all agree with me, then I know you’re not all thinking! Look, it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that some minor improvements can be made to CPI. The number has been tweaked and improved for a hundred years, and it will be tweaked and improved some more in the future. It is in my opinion not reasonable to suppose that the number is completely made up and/or drastically incorrect. And that’s my opinion.
