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No Need to Rob Peter to Pay Paul
So, I suppose the good news is that policymakers have stopped pretending that prices will go back down to the pre-pandemic levels. My friend Andy Fately (@fx_poet) in his daily note today called to my attention these dark remarks from Bank of England Chief “Economist” Huw Pill:
“If the cost of what you’re buying has gone up compared to what you’re selling, you’re going to be worse off…So somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing the energy costs through on to customers…And what we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off, and we all have to take our share.”
I think it’s worth stopping to re-read those words again. There are two implications that immediately leap out to me.
The first is that this is scary-full-Socialist. “We all have to take our share” is so anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, anti-individualist that it reeks of something that came from the pages of Atlas Shrugged. No, thank you, I don’t care to take my share of your screw-up. I would like to defend my money, and my real spending power, and my real lifestyle. If that comes at the cost of your lifestyle, Mr. Pill, then I’m sorry.
But the second point is that…it doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s lifestyle. This is why I put “economist” in quotation marks above. There is still a lot of confusion out there between the price level and inflation, and what a change in the price level means, but if you’re an economist there shouldn’t be.
You see statements like this everywhere…”food prices are up 18%. If people are spending 18% more on food, it means they’re spending less elsewhere.” “Rents are up 17%. If people are spending 17% more on rent, it means they’re spending less elsewhere.” “Pet food is up 21%. If people are spending 21% more on pet food, it means they’re spending less elsewhere.” “New vehicle prices are up 22%. If people are spending 22% more on new vehicles, it means they’re spending less elsewhere.” “Price of appliances are up 19%. If people are spending 19% more on new appliances, it means they’re spending less elsewhere.”
You get my point. All of those, incidentally, are actual aggregate price changes since the end of 2019.
This is where an actual economist should step in and say “if the amount of money in circulation is up 37%, why does spending 18% more on good or service A mean that we have to spend less on good or service B?” In fact, this is only true if the growth in the aggregate amount of money is distributed highly unevenly. In ‘normal’ times, that might be a defensible assumption but during the pandemic money was distributed remarkably evenly.
Okay…the amount of money in circulation is a ‘stock’ number and the prices of stuff changing over time is a ‘flow’ number, which is why money velocity also matters. M*V is up about 24% since the end of 2019. So a 20% rise in prices shouldn’t be surprising, and since there’s lots more money out there a 20% rise in the price of one good does not imply you need to spend less on another good. That’s only true in a non-inflationary environment. The world has changed. You need to learn to think in real terms, especially if you are a “Chief Economist.”
(N.b. to be sure, this is somewhat definitional since we define V as PQ/M, but the overarching point is that with 40% more money in the system, it should be not the slightest bit surprising to see prices up 20%. And, if velocity really does act like a spring storing potential energy, then we should eventually expect to see prices up more like 30-40%.)
Here’s a little bonus thought.
Rents are +17%, which is roughly in line with a general rise in the prices of goods and services. Home prices are up about 36% (using Shiller 20-City Home Price Index), which is roughly in line with the raw increase in M2.
Proposition: since the price of unproductive real assets is essentially an exchange rate of dollars:asset – which means that an increase in a real asset’s price is the inverse of the dollar’s decrease – then the price of a real asset should reflect the stock of money since price is dictated by the relative scarcity of the quantity of dollars versus the real asset. But the price of a consumer good or service should reflect the flow of money, so something more like the MV/Q concept.
Implication:
Discuss.
Who’s Afraid of De-Dollarization?
Do we need to worry about the end of dollar dominance in international trade – the de-dollarization of global finance?
I am hoping to do a podcast on this topic in a few weeks, featuring a guest who is actually an expert on foreign exchange and who can push back on my thought processes (or, less likely, echo them) – but the topic seems timely now. There is widespread discussion and concern in some quarters, as China and Russia push forward efforts to establish the Chinese Yuan as an alternative currency for international trade settlement, that this could spell the sunset of the dollar’s dominance. Some of the more animated commentators declare that de-dollarization will dramatically and immediately eviscerate the standard of living in the United States and condemn the nation to be an also-ran third-rate economy as its citizens descend into unspeakable squalor.
Obviously, such ghoulish prognostications are ridiculously overdone for the purpose of generating clicks. But how much of it is true, at least on some level? What would happen if, tomorrow, the US dollar lost its status as the world’s primary reserve currency?
One thing that wouldn’t change at all is the quantity of dollars in circulation. That’s a number that the Federal Reserve exerts some control over (they used to have almost total control, when banks were reserve-constrained; now that banks have far more reserves than they need, they can lend as much as they like, creating as many floating dollars as they like, constrained only by their balance sheet). The holders of dollars have absolutely no control over the amount of them in circulation! If Party A doesn’t like owning dollars, they can sell their dollars – but they have to sell it to some Party B, who then holds the dollars.
What also wouldn’t change immediately is how many dollar reserves every country holds. From time to time, people get concerned that “China is going to sell all of its dollars.” But China got those dollars because they sell us more stuff than we sell them, which causes them to accumulate dollars over time. How can China get rid of their dollars? Their options are fairly limited:
- They can start buying more from us than they sell to us. We’ve been trying to get them to do this for years! Seems unlikely.
- They can buy from us, stuff priced in dollars, but only sell goods to us that are priced in Yuan. To get Yuan, a US purchaser would have to sell dollars to buy Yuan. Since China doesn’t want to be the other side of that trade (which would leave them with the same amount of dollars), the US purchaser would have to go elsewhere to buy Yuan. This would strengthen the Yuan. This is also something we’ve been trying to get them to do for years! The Bank of China stops the Yuan from strengthening against the dollar by…selling Yuan and buying dollars. Hmmm.
- They can just hit the bid and sell dollars against all sorts of other currencies. This would greatly weaken the dollar, and is perhaps the biggest fear of many of the people worried about de-dollarization.
Supposing that China decided on #3, they would be making US industry much more competitive around the world against all of the currencies that China was buying. Foreign buyers of US products would now be able to buy US goods much more cheaply. It would cause more inflation in the US, but it would take a large dollar decline to drastically increase US inflation since foreign trade is a smaller part of the US economy than it is for many other countries.
A much lower dollar, making US prices look lower to non-US customers, would help balance the US trade deficit. Yay!
A tendency towards balance of the trade deficit would have ancillary impacts. When the US government runs a fiscal deficit, it borrows from essentially two places: domestic savers and foreign savers. Foreigners, having a surplus of dollars (since they have trade surpluses with us), buy Treasuries among other things. If the trade deficit went down drastically, so would foreign demand for US Treasuries. That in turn would (unless the government started to balance its fiscal deficit) cause higher interest rates, which would be necessary to induce domestic savers to buy more Treasuries. Or, if domestic savers were not up to the task, the buyer of last resort would be…the Federal Reserve, which could buy those bonds with printed money. And that’s a really bad outcome.
Now, does any of this cause a collapse of the American system or spell an end to US hegemony? No. If policymakers respond to such an event by refusing to get the fiscal house in order, then things could get ugly. But it would be hard to blame that outcome on the end of the dollar as the medium of international trade – blame would more appropriately be directed at the failure of domestic policymakers to adjust in response.
In the end, it is hard to escape the idea that good or bad economic and inflation outcomes in the United States track mainly, one way or the other, back to domestic policy decisions. Whether the US economic system remains a dominant one is…fortunately or unfortunately…in our hands, not in the hands of foreign state actors.
The Phillips Curve is Still Working Just Fine
About five and a half years ago, I wrote a blog article entitled “The Phillips Curve is Working Just Fine, Thanks”, in response to the exhaustively-repeated nonsense that the ‘Phillips Curve is Broken.’ This nonsense never really goes away, but last week Fed Governor Waller delivered a speech on “The Unstable Phillips Curve,” derived from the same nonsense, and I felt duty-bound to resurrect my prior article and update it. The Phillips Curve has not been unstable at all, over the last quarter century at least. Here is my original article, linked here:
I must say that it is discouraging how often I have to write about the Phillips Curve.
The Phillips Curve is a very simple idea and a very powerful model. It simply says that when labor is in short supply, its price goes up. In other words: labor, like everything else, is traded in the context of supply and demand, and the price is sensitive to the balance of supply and demand.
Somewhere along the line, people decided that what Phillips really meant was that low unemployment caused consumer price inflation. It turns out that doesn’t really work (see chart, source BLS, showing unemployment versus CPI since 1997).
Accordingly, since the Phillips Curve is “broken,” lots of work has been done to resurrect it by “augmenting” it with expectations. This also does not work, although if you add enough variables to any model you will eventually get a decent fit.
And so here we are, with Federal Reserve officials and blue-chip economists alike bemoaning that the Fed has “only one model, and it’s broken,” when it never really worked in the first place. (Incidentally, the monetary model that relates money and velocity (via interest rates) to the price level works quite well, but apparently they haven’t gotten around to rediscovering monetarism at the Fed).
But the problem is not in our stars, but in ourselves. There is nothing wrong with the Phillips Curve. The title of William Phillips’ original paper is “The Relation between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957.” Note that there is nothing in that title about consumer inflation! Here is the actual Phillips Curve in the US over the last 20 years, relating the Unemployment Rate to wages 9 months later.
The trendline here is a simple power function and actually resembles the shape of Phillips’ original curve. The R-squared of 0.91, I think, sufficiently rehabilitates Phillips. Don’t you?
I haven’t done anything tricky here. The Atlanta Fed Wage Growth Tracker is a relevant measure of wages which tracks the change in the wages of continuously-employed persons, and so avoids composition effects such as the fact that when unemployment drops, lower-quality workers (who earn lower wages) are the last to be hired. The 9-month lag is a reasonable response time for employers to respond to labor conditions when they are changing rapidly such as in 2009…but even with no lag, the R-squared is still 0.73 or so, despite the rapid changes in the Unemployment Rate in 2008-09.
So let Phillips rest in peace with his considerable contribution in place. Blame the lack of inflation on someone else.
Before I add to my rant, let me update the chart above with data since then, including the pandemic. The green dots in the chart below correspond to the dots in the chart above; the blue dots are for the period since then.
Amazingly, even during the pandemic and post-pandemic period, the Phillips Curve did a pretty decent job of describing the basic shape of this relationship. The dots overall are a bit higher; that’s attributable I think to the fact that inflation itself is higher and I’ve done this chart in nominal terms. There is some money illusion operating (or else the latest dots would be a lot higher), but it’s still a pretty nice fit, considering. I’ve preserved the prior regression line, but it doesn’t really shift very much.
In fact, the deviation prior to the pandemic – the little knot of blue dots to the left – are somewhat more surprising in a way, given the much lower economic volatility that there was when those points were laid down. But in any event, though, there is nothing obviously wrong with the Phillips Curve.
Now, it is true that the Unemployment Rate and the rate of consumer inflation have not been particularly well-behaved. But that isn’t a new phenomenon; that particular inconvenience has been that way for decades. The reason is pretty straightforward, and only confusing if you spent too much time getting a PhD and getting taught dumb things: the connection between wages and prices is not 1:1. It’s not constant. And there’s no particular reason that it should be, because labor is just one input into production costs, and the cost of production just affects the supply side of the supply/demand interplay which determines price. The really weird thing is that anyone ever thought that prices would be set by taking the current wage cost and adding a simple and stable markup.
A wage is just the price of labor, which is set in the market for labor, which involves the demand for labor and the supply of labor. The supply of labor changes very slowly. The demand for labor moves with the economic cycle. When the economic cycle is ebbing, the demand for labor falls – and that causes the quantity of labor demanded to decline (the unemployment rate goes up) as it also causes the price of labor to fall. That’s what happens when a demand curve shifts leftward on a mostly-static supply curve: Q down, P down. When the economic cycle is flowing, the demand for labor rises, which causes the quantity of labor demanded to increase (the unemployment rate declines) and the price of labor to rise. It isn’t that hard. In fact, you learn that in pretty much the first semester of economics.
It’s those later semesters that screw up economists, encouraging them to design complicated models that are very pretty but don’t necessarily relate to real-world dynamics. We should not be at all surprised when those models don’t work in the real world.
But don’t blame Phillips.
Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets (February 2023)
Below is a summary of my post-CPI tweets. You can (and should!) follow me @inflation_guy, but subscribers to @InflGuyPlus get the tweets in real time and a conference call wrapping it all up by about the time the stock market opens. Subscribe by going to the shop at https://inflationguy.blog/shop/ , where you can also subscribe to the Enduring Investments Quarterly Inflation Outlook. Sign up for email updates to my occasional articles here. Individual and institutional investors, issuers and risk managers with interests in this area be sure to stop by Enduring Investments! Check out the Inflation Guy podcast!
- Welcome to the #CPI #inflation walkup! To be sure, the importance of this data point in the short run is much less than it was a week ago, but it would be a mistake to lose sight of inflation now that the Fed is likely moving from QT to QE again.
- A reminder to subscribers of the tweet schedule: At 8:30ET, when the data drops, I will post a number of charts and numbers, in fairly rapid-fire succession. Then I will retweet some of those charts with comments attached. Then I’ll run some other charts.
- Afterwards (recently it’s been 9:30ish) I will have a private conference call for subscribers where I’ll quickly summarize the numbers.
- After my comments on the number, I will post a partial summary at https://inflationguy.blog and later will podcast a summary at inflationguy.podbean.com .
- I am also going to try and record the conference call for later. I think I’ve figured out how to do that. If I’m successful, I’ll tweet that later also.
- Thanks again for subscribing! And now for the walkup.
- This picture of the last month has changed quite a bit over the last few days! Suddenly, rates have reversed and the nominal curve is steepening. The inflation market readings are…of sketchy quality at the moment.
- Now, the swap market has also re-priced the inflation trough: instead of 2.65% in June (was in low 2s not long ago), the infl swap market now has y/y bottoming at 3.34% b/c of base effects before bouncing to 3.7% & then down to 3.15% by year-end. I think that’s pretty unlikely.
- Let’s remember that Median CPI reached a new high JUST LAST MONTH, contrary to expectations (including mine). The disturbing inflation trend is what had persuaded investors…until late last week…that the Fed might abruptly lurch back to a 50bp hike.
- These are real trends…so I’m not sure why economists are acting as if they are still certain that inflation is decelerating. The evidence that it is, so far at least, is sparse.
- Also, this month not only did the Manheim used car index rise again, but Black Book (historically a better fit although BLS has changed their sampling source so we’re not sure) also did. I have that adding 0.04%-0.05% to core.
- But maybe this is a good time to step back a bit, because of the diminished importance of this report (to be sure, if we get a clean 0.5%, it’s going to be very problematic for the Fed which means it should also be problematic for equity investors).
- Over the last few days we’ve read a lot about how banks are seeing deposits leave for higher-yielding opportunities. This is completely expected: as interest rates rise, the demand for real cash balances declines.
- You may have heard me say that before. But it’s really Friedman who said that first: velocity is the inverse of the demand for real cash balances. DEPOSITS LEAVING FOR HIGHER YIELDS IS EXACTLY WHAT HIGHER VELOCITY MEANS.
- And it is the reason for the very high correlation of velocity with interest rates.
- So the backdrop is this: money may be declining slightly but velocity is rebounding hard. Exactly as we should expect. Our model is shown here – it’s heavily influenced by interest rates (but not only interest rates).
- And if the Fed is going to move from its modest QT to QE, especially if they don’t ALSO slash rates back towards zero, then the inflationary impulse has little reason to fade.
- You know, I said back when the Fed started hiking that they would stop once the market forced them to. What has been amazing is that there were no accidents until now, so the market let them go for it. And in the long run this is good news – rates nearer neutral.
- But we have now had some bumps (and to be fair, I said no accidents until now but of course if the FDIC and Fed had been doing their job and monitoring duration gaps…this accident started many many months ago).
- With respect to how the Fed responds to this number: it is important to remember that the IMPACT ON INFLATION of an incremental 25bps or 50bps is almost zero. Especially in the short run. It might even be precisely zero.
- But the impact of 25bps or 50bps on attitudes, on deposit flight, and on liquidity hoarding could be severe, in the short run. On the other hand, if the Fed stands pat and does nothing but end QT, it might smack of panic.
- If I were at the Fed, I’d be deciding between 25bps and 0bps. And the only decent argument for 25bps is that it evinces a “business as usual” air. It won’t affect 2023 inflation at all (even using the Fed’s models which assume rates affect inflation).
- Here are the forecasts I have for the number – I tweeted this yesterday too. I’m a full 0.1% higher on core than the Street economists, market, and Kalshi. But I’m in-line on headline. So obviously as noted above I see the risks as higher.
- Market reactions? If we get my number or higher, it creates an obvious dilemma for the Fed and that means bad things for the market no matter how the Fed resolves that. Do they ignore inflation or ignore market stability?
- If we get lower than the economists’ expectation (on core), then it’s good news for the market because MAYBE it means the Fed isn’t in quite such a bad box and can do more to support liquidity (read: support the mo mo stock guys).
- So – maybe this report is important after all! Good luck today. I will be back live at 8:31ET.
- Well, headline was below core!
- Waiting for database to update but on a glance this doesn’t look good. Core was an upside surprise slightly and that was with used cars a DRAG.
- m/m CPI: 0.37% m/m Core CPI: 0.452%
- Last 12 core CPI figures
- So this to me looks like bad news. I don’t see the deceleration that everyone was looking for. We will look at some of the breakdown in a minute.
- M/M, Y/Y, and prior Y/Y for 8 major subgroups
- Standing out a couple of things: Apparel (small weight) jumps again…surprising. And Medical Care is back to a drag…some of that is insurance adjustment (-4.07% m/m, pretty normal) and some is Doctors Services (-0.52% m/m), while Pharma (0.14%) only a small add.
- Core Goods: 1.03% y/y Core Services: 7.26% y/y
- We start to see the problem here: any drag continues to be in core goods. Core goods does not have unlimited downside especially with the USD on the back foot. Core services…no sign of slowing.
- Primary Rents: 8.76% y/y OER: 8.01% y/y
- And rents…still accelerating y/y.
- Further: Primary Rents 0.76% M/M, 8.76% Y/Y (8.56% last) OER 0.7% M/M, 8.01% Y/Y (7.76% last) Lodging Away From Home 2.3% M/M, 6.7% Y/Y (7.7% last)
- Last month, OER and Primary Rents had slipped a bit and econs assumed that was the start of the deceleration. Maybe, but they re-accelerated a bit this month. Lodging away from home a decent m/m jump, but actually declined y/y so you can see that’s seasonal.
- Some ‘COVID’ Categories: Airfares 6.38% M/M (-2.15% Last) Lodging Away from Home 2.26% M/M (1.2% Last) Used Cars/Trucks -2.77% M/M (-1.94% Last) New Cars/Trucks 0.18% M/M (0.23% Last)
- FINALLY we see the rise in airfares that has been long overdue. I expected this to add 0.01% to core; it actually added 0.05%. Those who want to say this is a good number will screech “outlier!” but really it’s just catching up. The outlier is used cars.
- Both the Manheim and Black Book surveys clearly showed an increase in used car prices. But the BLS has recently changed methodologies on autos. Not clear what they’re using. Maybe it’s just timing and used will add back next month. We will see.
- Here is my early and automated guess at Median CPI for this month: 0.634%
- Now, the caveat to this chart is that I was off last month (the actual figure reported is shown), but that was January. I think I’ll be better on February. I have the median category as Food Away from Home. This chart is bad news for the deceleration crowd, and for the Fed.
- Piece 1: Food & Energy: 7.97% y/y
- OK, Food and Energy is decelerating, but both still contributed high rates of change. Energy will oscillate. It is uncomfortable that Food is still adding.
- Piece 2: Core Commodities: 1.03% y/y
- This is the reason headline was lower than expected. Core goods – in this case largely Used Cars, which I thought would add 0.05% and instead subtracted 0.09% from core. That’s a -14bps swing. +5bps from airfares, but health insurance was a drag…and we were still >consensus.
- Piece 3: Core Services less Rent of Shelter: 5.96% y/y
- …and this is the engine that NEEDS to be heading sharply lower if we’re going to get to 3.15% by end of year. It’s drooping, but not hard.
- Piece 4: Rent of Shelter: 8.18% y/y
- …and I already talked about this. No deceleration evident. As an aside, it’s not clear why we would see one with rising landlord costs, a shortage of housing, and robust wage gains, but…it’s an article of faith out there.
- Core inflation ex-shelter decelerated from 3.94% y/y to 3.74% y/y. That’s good news, although mainly it serves to amplify Used Cars…but look, even if you take out the big add from sticky shelter, we’re still not anywhere near target.
- Equity investors seem to love this figure. Be kind. They’re not thinking clearly these days. It’s a bad number that makes the Fed’s job really difficult.
- Note that Nick Timiraos didn’t signal anything yesterday…that means the Fed hasn’t decided yet. Which means they cared about this number. Which means to me that we’re likely getting 25bps, not 0bps. Now, maybe they just wanted to watch banking for another few days, but…
- …the inflation news isn’t good. As I said up top, 25bps doesn’t mean anything to inflation, but if they skip then it means we are back in QE and hold onto your hats because inflation is going to be a problem for a while.
- Even if they hike, they will probably arrest QT – and that was the only part of policy that was helping. Higher rates was just accelerating velocity. But I digress. Point is, this is a bad print for a Fed hoping for an all-clear hint.
- The only core categories with annualized monthly changes lower than -10% was Used Cars and Trucks (-29%). Core categories ABOVE +10% annualized monthly: Public Transport (+46%), Lodging AFH (+31%), Jewelry/Watches (+20%), Misc Personal Svcs (+17.7%), Footwear (+18%), >>>
- Women’s/Girls’ Apparel (+15%), Tobacco and Smoking Products (+13%), Recreation (+11%), Motor Vehicle Insurance (+11%), Infants’/Toddlers’ Apparel (+11%), and Misc Personal Goods (+10%). Although I also have South Urban OER at +10%, using my seasonality estimate.
- On the Medical Care piece, we really should keep in mind this steady drag from the crazy Health Insurance plug estimate for this year. It’ll almost certainly be an add next year. Imagine where we’d be on core if that was merely flat rather than in unprecedented deflation.
- Let’s go back to median for a bit. The m/m Median was 0.63% (my estimate), which is right in line with last month. The caveat is that the median category was Food Away from Home but that was surrounded by a couple of OER categories which are the ones I have to estimate. [Corrected from original tweet, which cited 0.55% as my median estimate]
- I can’t re-emphasize this enough. Inflation still hasn’t PEAKED, much less started to decline.
- One place we had seen some improvement was in narrowing BREADTH of inflation. Still broad, but narrower. However, this month it broadened again just a bit and the EIIDI ticked higher. Higher median, broader inflation…and that’s with Used Cars a strange drag.
- Stocks still don’t get it, but breakevens do. The 10y BEI is +7bps today. ESH3 is +49 points though!
- We’ll stop it there for now. Conference call will be at 9:30ET (10 minutes). (518) [redacted] Access Code [redacted]. I will be trying to record this one for playback for subscribers who can’t tune in then.
- The conference call recording seemed to go well. If you want to listen to it, you can call the playback number at (757) 841-1077, access code 736735. The recording is about 12 minutes long.
In retrospect, my forecast of 0.4% on seasonally-adjusted headline and 0.5% on core looks pretty good…but that’s only because we got significant downward one-offs, notably from Used Cars. If Used Cars had come in where I was expecting (+1.4%) instead of where it actually came in (-2.8%), and the rest of the report had been the same, then core inflation would have been 0.6% and we would be having a very different discussion right now.
As it is, this is not the number that the Fed needed. Inflation has not yet peaked, and that’s with Health Insurance providing a 4-5bps drag every month. That’s with Used Cars showing a drag instead of the contribution I expected. The “transitory” folks will be pointing to rents and saying that it seems ridiculous, and ‘clearly must decline,’ but that’s not as clear to me. Landlords are facing increased costs for maintenance, financing, energy, taxes; there is a shortage of housing so there is a line of tenants waiting to rent, and wage growth remains robust so these tenants can pay. Why should rents decelerate or even (as some people have been declaring) decline?
Apparel was also a surprising add. Its weight is low but the strength is surprising. A chart of the apparel index is below. Clothing prices now are higher than they’ve been since 2000. The USA imports almost all of its apparel. This is a picture of the effect of deglobalization, perhaps.
So all of this isn’t what the Fed wanted to see. A nice, soft inflation report would have allowed the Fed to gracefully turn to supporting markets and banks, and put the inflation fight on hold at least temporarily. But the water is still boiling and the pot needs to be attended. I think it would be difficult for the Fed to eschew any rate hike at all, given this context. However, I do believe they’ll stop QT – selling bonds will only make the mark-to-market of bank securities holdings worse.
But in the bigger picture, the FOMC at some point needs to address the question of why nearly 500bps of rate hikes have had no measurable effect on inflation. Are the lags just much longer than they thought, and longer than in the past? That seems a difficult argument. But it may be more palatable to them than considering whether increasing interest rates by fiat while maintaining huge quantities of excess reserves is a strategy that – as monetarists would say and have been saying – should not have a significant effect on inflation. The Fed models of monetary policy transmission have been terribly inaccurate. The right thing to do is to go back to first principles and ask whether the models are wrong, especially since there is a cogent alternative theory that could be considered.
Back when I wrote What’s Wrong With Money?, my prescription for unwinding the extraordinary largesse of the global financial crisis – never mind the orders-of-magnitude larger QE of COVID policy response – was exactly the opposite. I said the Fed should decrease the money supply, while holding interest rates down (since, if interest rates rise, velocity should be expected to rise as well and this will exacerbate the problem in the short-term). The Fed has done the opposite, and seem so far to be getting the exact opposite result than they want.
Just sayin’.
The Powell of Positive Thinking
Yes: Federal Reserve Chairman Powell was very hawkish at his Congressional testimony on Tuesday and Wednesday. He clearly signaled (again) that once Fed overnight policy rates reach a peak, they would not be declining for a while. He additionally signaled that the peak probably will be higher than previously signaled (I’ve been saying and thinking 5% for a while, but it’s going to be higher), and even signaled the increasing likelihood of a return to 50bp hikes after the recent deceleration to 25bps.
This latter point, in my view, is the least likely since all of the reasons for the step down to 25bps remain valid: whether the peak is 5% or 6%, it is relatively nearby and the confidence that we should have that rates have not risen enough should therefore be decreasing rapidly. Moreover, since monetary policy works with a lag and there has been very little lag since the aggressive tightening campaign began, it would be reasonable to slow down or stop to assess the effect that prior hikes have had.
But here is the bigger point, and one that Powell did not broach. There is really not much evidence at all that the Fed’s hikes to date have affected inflation. It is completely an article of faith that they surely will, but this is not the same as saying that they have. Consider for a moment: in what way could we plausibly argue that rate hikes so far have been responsible for the decline in inflation? The decline in inflation has been entirely from the goods sector, and a good portion of that has been from used cars returning to a normal level (meaning, in line with the growth in money) after having overshot. How exactly has monetary policy driven down the prices of goods?
This is not to say that higher interest rates have not affected economic activity, and this (to me) is the real surprise: given the amount of leverage extant in the corporate world, it amazes me that we haven’t seen a more-serious retrenchment. Some of this is pent-up demand that still needs to be satisfied, for example in housing where significant rate hikes would normally dampen housing demand substantially and seems to have. However, there is a severe shortage of housing in the country and so construction continues (and home prices, while they have fallen slightly, show no signs of the collapse that so many have forecast). Higher rates are also rippling through the commercial MBS market, as many commercial landlords have inexplicably financed their projects with floating rate debt and where the cost of leverage can make or break the project.
Higher interest rates, on the other hand, tend to support residential rents, at least until unemployment eventually rises appreciably. I think perhaps that not many economists are landlords, but higher costs tend to not result in a desire to charge lower rents. On the commercial side, leases are for longer and turnover is more costly, but the average residential landlord these days is not facing a shortage of demand.
So where have rate hikes caused inflation to decline? Judging from the fact that Median CPI just set a new high, I think the answer is pretty plain: they haven’t. And yet, the Fed believes that if they keep hiking, inflation will fall into place. Where else can we more plainly see at work the maxim that “if a piece doesn’t fit, you’re not using a big enough hammer?” Or maybe, this is just a reflection of the notion that if you want something bad enough, the wanting itself will cause the thing to happen. [N.B. this is really more in line with the prescription from Napoleon Hill’s classic book “Think and Grow Rich”, but the title of Peale’s equally-classic “The Power of Positive Thinking” suggested a catchier title for this article. Consider it poetic license.]
Moreover, what we have seen is that higher interest rates have had the predicted effect on money velocity. Although I have elsewhere noted that part of the rebound in money velocity so far is due to the ‘spring force’ effect, there is substantial evidence that one of the main drivers of money velocity is the interest rate earned on non-cash balances. Enough so, in fact, that I wrote about the connection in June 2022 in a piece entitled “The Coming Rise in Money Velocity,” before the recent surge in velocity began. [I’d also call your attention to a recently-published article by Samuel Reynard of the Swiss National Bank, “Central bank balance sheet, money, and inflation,” where he incorporates money velocity into his adjusted money supply growth figure. Reynard is one of the last monetarists extant in central banking circles.]
Now, nothing that I have just written is going to deter Powell & Co from continuing to hike rates until demand is finally crushed and, according to their faith but in the absence of evidence to date, inflation will decelerate back to where they want it. But with long-term inflation breakevens priced at levels mirroring that faith, it is worth questioning whether there is some value in being apostate.
Is Inflation Mean-Reverting?
Over the last couple of decades, the assumption that inflation is mean-reverting to something approximating the Fed’s target level (or to where inflation expectations are supposedly – without any evidence advanced to support the notion – ‘anchored’) has become a key component of most economists’ models. I’ve pointed out a number of times in podcasts (including my own Inflation Guy Podcast as well as numerous others) and in articles that after a quarter-century of having low and stable inflation any model which did not assume mean-reversion has been discarded because it made bad predictions over that period compared to one which did.
A critical follow-up question is whether a model should assume mean reversion in inflation. My observation implicitly says that it should not. If I’m wrong, and inflation in fact is mean-reverting, then the right models won and there’s no real problem.
So, did the right models win?
There are many sophisticated ways to test for mean reversion, but an intuitive one is this: for a given current level of inflation, which is a better guess: (a) inflation will be closer to the ‘mean’ in the next period; (b) inflation will be about the same distance from the mean (homeostasis), neither pulling towards the mean nor pushing away from the mean; or (c) inflation will be further away from the mean, such that deviations from mean get amplified over time. In case (b) we would say that inflation itself has momentum; in case (c) we would say the acceleration of inflation has momentum. The latter case seems an unlikely case of extreme instability: it says that once prices move away from equilibrium, the economy either enters into an inflationary spiral or a deflationary spiral with no clear end. While this clearly can eventually happen in the hyperinflation case, those cases seem to have other causes that tend to amplify the swings (notably, an accelerating loss of faith in the currency itself).
Let’s consider case (a) and (b), and look at some historical data.
The chart below shows the period 1957-2022. The x-axis indicates the current level of inflation, (I collapse the range from -0.5% to +0.5% and call it 0%, +0.5% to +1.5% and call it 1%, etc), and the y-axis shows the average inflation over the subsequent one year. So, the point that is at [2%, 2.3%] shows that between 1957 and 2022, if inflation was between 1.5% and 2.5% then the average inflation over the ensuing 12 months was 2.3%.
I’ve drawn a line that indicates inflation at the same level at the point of observation and subsequently (x=y). Notice that for any number below x=2%, y tends towards 2%. This shows that when the current reading is very low inflation or deflation, the subsequent year we tend to get something close to 2%. Notice that at higher rates of inflation, the dots are below the line – meaning that if inflation is high, the following year tends to see inflation closer to the target. So, this is what we would think mean reversion would look like (and FWIW, it is more pronounced if you choose a longer historical period but because the next chart I am showing is core CPI and we only have data to 1957, I wanted to use the same range).
Case closed! Inflation mean reverts!
Well, not exactly. This is headline inflation. We already know that food and energy tend to mean-revert; that is, after all, why economists exclude food and energy – because we know that high energy readings lead to high inflation prints, and we don’t want monetary policy to overreact to inflation that isn’t really persistent. So, let’s look at core instead.
This chart looks different in key aspects. Except for very high core readings (with comparatively few observations that happen to coincide with when Volcker was aggressively tightening policy), the best estimate for core inflation over the next 12 months is not something closer to the assumed mean; the best estimate is the same level as what we have right now.
What that means – and it is super important – is that inflation has momentum. Keep in mind that during most of the period shown here, the Federal Reserve was actively trying to make inflation mean-revert. And they didn’t succeed, at least on a one-year basis.
Well, monetary policy works with long and variable lags, right? How about core inflation over the period 12-24 months from now? Surely then we should see some mean reversion?
The answer, at least for core inflation, is decidedly no…except for very high current readings of inflation.
Two takeaways:
- Inflation has momentum. This means that forecasting core inflation to return to the target level, just because we think it should, is a bad forecasting approach.
- Monetary policy seems to have had, at least over this period, very little effect. Generously, it didn’t have effect on average…so perhaps sometimes the Fed overshot and other times it didn’t do enough. There is indeed a range. For example: starting from 5% y/y core inflation (between 4.5% and 5.5%), the 10th percentile of the 1y CPI outcomes after that was 3.5% and the 90th percentile was 6.0%. Starting from 7%, the 10th percentile was 3.1% and the 90th was 9.6%. So the average includes some times when inflation kept going up and some times when it was going back down.
The corollary to the second takeaway…call it takeaway 2a…is this: by the same token, there’s not a lot of reason for the Fed to be super aggressive raising rates to rein in inflation. We know that they can do harm. It’s less clear that they can do a whole lot of good!
We Are All Bond Traders Now
When I started working in the financial markets, bond traders were the cool kids. The equity guys drove Maseratis and acted like buffoons, but the bond guys drove sensible style like Mercedes and cared about things like deficits and credit. The authoritative word on this subject came from the book Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, about 1980s Salomon Brothers, where the trainees dreaded being assigned to do Equities in Dallas.
Back then, equities guys worried about earnings, the quality of management and the balance sheet, and the really boring ones worried about a margin of safety and investing at the right price. That seems Victorian now, but I guess so does the idea that sober institutions should only own bonds.
Down the list of concerns, but still on it, were interest rates. Ol’ Marty Zweig used to have a commercial in which he said “if you can spot meaningful changes (not just zig-zags) in interest rates and momentum, you’ll be mostly in stocks during major advances and out during major declines.” The reason that interest rates matter at all to a stock jockey is that the present value of any series of cash flows, such as dividends, depends on the interest rate used to discount those cash flows.
In general, if the discount curve (yield curve) is flat, then the present value of a series of cash flows is the sum of the present values of each cash flow:
…where r is the interest rate.
As a special case, if all of the cash flows are equal and go on forever, then we have a perpetuity where PV = CF/r. Note also that if all of the cash flows have the same real value and are only adjusted for inflation, and the denominator is a real interest rate, then you get the same answer to the perpetuity problem.[1]
I should say right now that the point of this article is not to go into the derivation of the Gordon Growth Model, or argue about how you should price something where the growth rate is above the discount rate, or how you treat negative rates in a way that doesn’t make one’s head explode. The point of this article is merely to demonstrate how the sensitivity of that present value to the numerator and the denominator changes when interest rates change.
The sensitivity to the numerator is easy. PV is linear with respect to CF. That is, if the cash flow increases $1 per period, then the present value of the whole series increases the same amount regardless of whether we are increasing from $2 to $3 or $200 to $201. In the table below, the left two columns represent the value of a $5 perpetuity versus a $6 perpetuity at various interest rates; the right two columns represents the value of a $101 perpetuity versus a $102 perpetuity. You can see that in each case, the value of the perpetuity increases the same amount going left to right in the green columns as it does going left to right in the blue columns. For example, if the interest rate is 5%, then an increase in $1 increases the total value by $20 whether it’s from $5 to $6 or $100 to $101.
However, the effect of the same-sized movement in the denominator is very different. We call this sensitivity to interest rates duration, and in one of its forms that sensitivity is defined as the change in the price for a 1% change in the yield.[2] Moving from 1% to 2% cuts the value of the annuity (in every case) by 50%, but moving from 4% to 5% cuts the value by only 20%.
What this means is that if interest rates are low, you care a great deal about the interest rate. Any change to your numerator is easily wiped out by a small change in the interest rate you are discounting at. But when interest rates are higher, this is less important and you can focus more on the numerator. Of course, in this case we are assuming the numerator does not change, but suppose it does? The importance of a change in the numerator depends not on the numerator, but on the denominator. And for a given numerator, any change in the denominator gets more important at low rates.
So, where am I going with this?
Let’s think about the stock market. For many years now, the stock market has acted as if what the Fed does is far more important than what the businesses themselves do. And you know what? Investors were probably being rational by doing so. At low interest rates, the change in the discount rate was far more important – especially for companies that don’t pay dividends, so they’re valued on some future harvest far in the future – than changes in company fortunes.
However, as interest rates rise this becomes less true. As interest rates rise, investors should start to care more and more about company developments. I don’t know that there is any magic about the 5% crossover that I have in that chart (the y-axis, by the way, is logarithmic because otherwise the orange line gets vertical as we get to the left edge!). But it suggests to me that stock-picking when interest rates are low is probably pointless, while stock-picking when interest rates are higher is probably fairly valuable. What does an earnings miss mean when interest rates are at zero? Much less than missing on the Fed call. But at 5%, the earnings miss is a big deal.
Perhaps this article, then, is mistitled. It isn’t that we are all bond traders now. It’s that, until recently, we all were bond traders…but this is less and less true.
And it is more and more true that forecasts of weak earnings growth for this year and next – are much more important than the same forecasts would have been, two years ago.
But the bond traders are still the cool kids.
[1] I should also note that r > 0, which is something we never had to say in the past. In nominal space, anyway, it would be an absurdity to have a perpetually negative interest rate, implying that future cash flows are worth more and more…and the perpetuity has infinite value.
[2] Purists will note that the duration at 2% is neither the change in value from 1% to 2% nor from 2% to 3%, but rather the instantaneous change at 2%, scaled by 100bps. But again, I’m not trying to get to fine bond math here and just trying to make a bigger point.
The Monetary Policy Revolution in Three Charts
Over the last few years, I’ve pointed out exhaustively how the current operating approach at the Fed towards monetary policy is distinctly different from past tightening cycles. In fact, it is basically a humongous experiment, and if the Fed succeeds in bringing inflation gently back down to target it will be either a monumental accomplishment or, more likely, monumentally lucky. My goal in this blog post is to explain the difference, and illustrate the challenge, in just a few straightforward charts. There are doubtless other people who have a far more complex way of illustrating this, but these charts capture the essence of the dynamic.
Let me start first with the basic ‘free market’ interest rate chart. Here, I am showing the quantity of bank lending on the x-axis, and the ‘price’ of the loan – the interest rate – on the y-axis. If we assume for the moment that inflation is stable (don’t worry, the fact that it isn’t will come into play later) then whether the y-axis is in nominal or real terms is irrelevant. So we have a basic supply and demand chart. Demand for loans slopes downward: as the interest rate declines, borrowers want to borrow more. The supply curve slopes upward: banks want to lend more money as the interest rate increases.
An important realization here is that the supply curve at some point turns vertical. There is some quantity of loans, more than which banks cannot lend. There are two main limits on the quantity of bank lending: the quantity of reserves, since a bank needs to hold reserves against its lending, and the amount of capital. These are both particular to a bank and to the banking sector as a whole, especially reserves because they are easily traded. Anyway, once aggregate lending is high enough that there are no more reserves available for a bank to acquire to support the lending, then the bank (and banks in aggregate) cannot lend any more at any interest rate – at least, in principle, and ignoring the non-bank lenders / loan sharks. We’re talking about the Fed’s actions here and the Fed does not directly control the leverage available to loan sharks.
Now, traditionally when the Fed tightened policy, it did so by reducing the aggregate quantity of reserves in the system. This had the effect of making the supply curve go vertical further to the left than it had. In this chart, the tightening shows as a movement from S to S’. Note that the equilibrium point involves fewer total loans (we moved left on the x axis), which is the intent of the policy: reduce the supply of money (or, in the dynamic case, its growth) by restraining reserves. Purely as a byproduct, and not very important at that, the interest rate rises. How much it rises depends on the shape of the demand curve – how elastic demand for loans is.
As an aside, we are assuming here that the secondary constraint – bank capital – is not binding. That is, if reserves were plentiful, the S curve would go vertical much farther to the right. In the Global Financial Crisis, that is part of what happened and was the reason that vastly increase reserves did not lead to massive inflation, nor to a powerful recovery: banks were capital-constrained, so that the Fed’s addition of more reserves did not help. Banks were lending all that they could, given their capital.
Manipulating the aggregate quantity of reserves was the way the Fed used to conduct monetary policy. No longer. Now, the Fed merely moves interest rates. Let’s see what effect that would have. Let’s assume for now that the interest rate is a hard floor, and that banks cannot lend at less than the floor rate. This isn’t true, but for ease of illustration. If the Fed institutes a higher floor on interest rates then what happens to the quantity of loans?
This looks like we have achieved the same result, more simply! We merely define the quantity of loans we want, pick the interest rate that will generate the demand for those loans, and voila, we can add as many reserves as we want and still get the loan production we need. The arrows in this third chart show the same movements as the arrows in the prior chart. The quantity of loans is really determined entirely by the demand curve – at the prescribed interest rate, there is a demand for “X” loans, and since banks are not reserve-constrained they are able to supply those loans.
However, it’s really important to notice a few things. The prior statement is true if and only if we know what the demand curve looks like, and if the floor is enforced. Then, a given interest rate maps perfectly into Q. But:
- D is not known with precision. And it moves. What is more, it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with interest rates: for example, general expectations about business opportunities or the availability of work.
- Moreover, D is really mapped against real rates, while the Fed is setting nominal rates. So, for a given level of a nominal floor, in real space it bucks up and down based on the expected inflation rate.
- Also, the floor is not a hard floor. At any given interest rate where the floor would be binding, the desire of banks to lend (the location of the S curve) exceeds the demand for loans (by the amount of the ?? segment in the chart above). The short-term interest rate still affects the cost to banks of that lending, but we would still expect competition among lenders. This should manifest in more aggressive lending practices – tighter credit spreads, for example, or non-rate competition such as looser documentary requirements.
In the second chart I showed, the Fed directly controlled the quantity of reserves and therefore loans. So these little problems didn’t manifest.
Now, there is one advantage to setting interest rates rather than setting the available quantity of reserves as a way of reducing lending activity. Only the banking sector is reserve-constrained. If there is an adequate non-bank lending network, then the setting of interest rates to control the demand for loans will affect the non-bank lenders as well while reserve constraint would not. So this is somewhat “fairer” for banks. But this only means that non-bank lenders will also be competing to fill the reduced demand for loans, and the non-bank lending sector is less-vigorously regulated than the banking sector. More-aggressive lending practices from unregulated lenders is not, it seems to me, something we should be encouraging but what do I know? The banks aren’t lobbying me to help level the playing field against the unregulated.
Hopefully this helps illuminate what I have been saying. I think the final chart above would be a lovely final exam question for an economics class, but a bad way to run a central bank. Reality is not so easily charted.
Oil Be Home For Christmas
As a general rule, don’t trade on pre-holiday thin-liquidity sessions. There can be amazing-seeming opportunities, but price can still get shoved in your face by whoever it is who feels like pushing markets around.
A prime example today is the energy market, where front-month oil prices are down nearly 4% at this writing. Recently, energy futures have been regularly jammed lower overnight in low-liquidity conditions and then have recovered during the day. There is a structural shortage of energy globally at the moment, and inventories are low…but sentiment is also very poor and as I’ve shown before, open interest has been in a downtrend for years – aggregate open interest in NYMEX Crude hasn’t been lower since 2012.
So, it’s a market ripe for pushing around and the day before Thanksgiving is probably not the day to take a stand by getting long even when the reasons given for the selloff are nonsense. Today, the story is again about the price cap on Russian oil that is being implemented soon by the US and EU. Market participants seem to struggle with Econ 101 here. A price cap has one of two effects in the market under consideration: if the price cap is set above the market-clearing price, it has no effect. If the price cap is set below the market-clearing price, it leads to shortages as suppliers – in this case, Russia – won’t supply as much oil (if any) to the capped market when there are other uncapped markets (say, China and India). There is probably an area near the price cap where the cost of switching to delivering oil in other markets is higher than the gain from switching deliveries, but that’s only in round 1 of the game theoretic outcome.[1]
In this case, since only the price from one supplier is capped, the result should be higher prices in the markets than otherwise since once price exceeds the cap, one supplier is lost. The chart below shows the classic outcome. Below the cap, the supply curve is normal. Above the cap, the supply curve is left-shifted.
This leads, at least in a frictionless market (which this isn’t), to prices being discontinuous around the cap. As demand shifts from left to right, prices behave normally and rise as they normally would, until abruptly jumping higher once the capped producer is removed. In any case, price is more volatile than it would otherwise be…but, and this is important, it is never lower in a market where some or all of the suppliers are capped, than it is in an uncapped market. At best, prices are the same if the caps aren’t in play. At worst, a combination of shortages and higher prices obtain.
Speaking of shortages…it seems that people are growing calmer about the chances of a bad energy outcome over the winter in Europe. This seems, to me, to be related to the fact that inventories of gas are reasonably flush thanks to conservation efforts and vigorous efforts to replace lost Russian pipeline supply (see Chart, source Gas Infrastructure Europe via Bloomberg).
That’s great, but the problem is that since the pipelines are not flowing Europe needs more gas going into the winter than they otherwise would have – because it’s not being replenished by pipeline during the winter, either. We certainly hope that Europe doesn’t run out of heat this winter, but the level of gas inventories is not exciting.
Putting downward pressure on both of these markets, but especially Crude, is the idea that the world will enter a global recession in 2023. As I’ve been saying since early this year, that’s virtually a sure thing: we’ve never seen interest rates and energy prices rise this much and not had a recession. But I have thought that the recession would be relatively mild, a ‘garden variety’ recession compared to the last three we’ve had (the tech bubble implosion, the global financial crisis, and the COVID recession). What worries me a bit is that the consensus is now moving to that conclusion. It seems that most forecasts are for a mild recession (although predictably, economists are all over the map on inflation depending on the degree to which they understand that inflation is a monetary phenomenon and not a growth phenomenon). I’m still in that camp, but that concerns me, because the consensus is usually wrong.
[1] In round 2, after oil delivery from Russia is switched to the uncapped markets, the available price in the capped market will need to be appreciably above the market clearing price in the uncapped market in order to cause the switch back.
The Coming Rise in Money Velocity
As M2 money growth soared throughout the COVID and post-COVID period of direct stimulus check-writing funded by massive quantitative easing (QE), monetarism novices thought that this would not result in inflation because money velocity simultaneously collapsed. Consequently, they argued, M*V was not growing at an outrageous rate.
There was precedence for such optimism. In the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09, money supply grew rapidly with the onset of QE and money velocity declined, never to recover. The chart below shows in a normalized fashion the rise in M, the decline in V, and the relative quiescence of MV/Q, which is of course P by definition as long as you choose your Ms, Vs, and Qs right.
A similar thing happened in this episode, so why would this be any different?
There are many reasons why these episodes are different. To name a few:
- The absolute scale of the rise in M2 was 2.5x the rise in 2007-2010, and that’s being generous since that measures the growth in 2007-2010 starting almost 2 years before the first QE in November 2008 compared to only 15 months in the second case.
- As I’ve written previously, QE in the first case was directed at banks; at the same time that the Federal Reserve was adding reserves it was also paying banks interest on reserves – because the point was to strengthen banks, not consumers.
- 5y interest rates came into 2008 at 3.44%; they came into 2020 at 1.69%. Since velocity is most highly correlated to interest rates, there was less room for this factor to be a lasting downward influence on velocity (after the crisis began in 2008, 5y Treasury rates never exceeded 3% again except for a few days in 2018).
- Bank credit growth never stopped in the 2020 crisis, while it contracted at a 5% rate in the 2008 crisis (see chart, source Board of Governors of the Fed).
The monetarist novices (you can tell they’re novices because they say things like “Friedman said velocity was constant,” which is false, or “velocity is just a plug number [true] and has no independent meaning of its own [false]”) insisted that velocity was in a permanently declining state and that there was no reason at all to expect it to ever “bounce.” After all, it bounced only slightly after the GFC; why should it do so now?
But after 2008, as I noted, interest rates bounced only briefly before declining again…with the added phenomenon that some global debt came to bear negative yields, calling into fair question whether there was in fact any natural “bottom” to velocity if interest rates are the main driver! And velocity, obediently, dripped lower as well.
There is at least one other big driver to money velocity, although it is rarely important and almost never for very long. And that is economic uncertainty, which creates a demand to carry excess cash balances (implying lower money velocity). A model driven (mainly) by rates and a measure of uncertainty has done a pretty good job at explaining velocity over time (see chart, source Enduring Investments), including explaining the collapse in velocity during the COVID crisis out-of-sample.
Now, explaining velocity is a helluva lot easier than predicting it, because it isn’t easy to predict interest rates. Nor is it easy to predict the precautionary demand for money – but at least we can count on that being somewhat mean-reverting. The latest point from the model shown above uses current data, and suggests (largely because of the rise in interest rates, but also because precautionary balances are declining) that money velocity should bounce. Not that the model predicts it will happen this week, but it should not be surprising when it does.
A rise in velocity would be a really bad thing, because the money supply is very unlikely to decline very far especially while bank credit growth continues to grow. The only reason we have been able to sustain 6% or 8% money growth for a very long time has been because we could count on velocity to keep declining with interest rates. If money growth ticks up at, say, a mere 6% while money velocity rises 5%, then nominal GDP is going to rise 11%…and most of that will be in prices.
Now, this is a very slow-moving story. I mention it now for one specific reason, and that is that we are almost certain to see a rise in velocity in Q2 when the GDP figures come out in late July. That’s because money growth for the quarter has been very slow so far. So far, the Q2 average M2 is 0.06% higher than the Q1 average. My best wild guess is that we will end up with an 0.5% annualized q/q growth rate. The Atlanta Fed GDPNow model estimates 0.25% GDP growth in Q2 (the Blue Chip Consensus is still at 3%). And if the inflation market is right, Q/Q inflation in Q2 will be about 11.7%. That’s CPI, so let’s be generous and say 9%. We don’t know all of these numbers, but we know 2/3 of all of them. Let’s use the Blue Chip consensus for GDP and assume M2 doesn’t spike next month and the price level doesn’t collapse. Then:
If that happened, the increase would be the largest quarterly jump in money velocity – absent the reactionary bounce in 2020Q3 after the 20% plunge in 2020Q2 – since 1981. And here’s the rub: because of the mathematics of declines and recoveries, that would still leave us with velocity that prior to 2020 would have been an all-time record low.
Does this matter? Not if you believe the monetarism dabblers, who will say this is a mechanical adjustment that will soon be reversed as velocity continues its long slide to oblivion. Nor will it matter to the Fed, who at best will take executive notice of the fact before ignoring it since they aren’t monetarists any longer. But for those who think that inflation comes from too much money chasing too few goods? It’s scary.
