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Dollar Rally Does Not Demand Deflation – Duh
There are many funny stories out about disinflation these days. The meme has gotten amazing momentum, even more than it usually does at this time of year (see my post last month, “Seasonal Allergies“). One of the most amusing has been the idea that the decision by the Bank of Japan to greatly increase its quantitative easing would be disinflationary in the U.S., because the yen would decline so sharply against the dollar, and dollar strength is generally assumed to be disinflationary.
The misunderstanding of the dollar effect is amazing, considering how easy it is to disprove. Sure, I understand the alarm at the dollar’s recent robust strength. Of course, such a large and rapid move must be disinflationary, right? Because who could forget the inflationary spiral of 2002-2008 in this country, when the value of the dollar fell 25%?
For the record, when the dollar hit its high in February 2002, core inflation was at 2.6%. It declined to 1.1% in 2003, before rebounding to 2.9% in 2006 and was at 2.3% in April 2008, when the dollar reached its pre-crisis low. That is, the dollar’s protracted and large decline caused essentially no meaningful change in core inflation. Indeed, without the housing bubble, core inflation would have declined markedly over this period.
Now, headline inflation rose during that period, because energy prices rose. This may or may not be the result of the dollar, or the causality may run at least partly the other way (because the dollar was cheaper, and oil is priced in dollars, oil got comparatively cheaper in foreign currencies, leading to greater demand). But what is very clear is that the underlying rate of inflation was not impacted by the dollar.
The bifurcation of inflation into core inflation and energy inflation (or food and energy inflation, if you like, but most of the volatility comes from energy inflation) is a critical point for both investors and policymakers. Much ink has recently been spilled about how the Saudi decision to lower the price of oil to better compete with U.S. shale supply, and the burgeoning shale supply itself, is disinflationary. But it isn’t, and it is important to understand why. Inflation is a rate of change measure, and more to the point a change in prices is not inflation per se unless it is persistent. Policymakers don’t focus on core inflation because they don’t care about food or energy or think that we don’t buy them; they focus on core inflation because it is more persistent than food or energy inflation.
So if gasoline prices aren’t merely in their usual seasonal dip, but actually continue lower for another year, it will result in headline inflation that is lower than core inflation over that period. But once it reaches a new equilibrium level, that downward pressure on headline inflation will abate, and it will re-converge with core.
Oil prices, in fact, are almost always a growth story rather than an inflation story, and some of the big monetary policy crack-ups of the past have occurred when the Fed addressed oil price spikes (plunges) with tighter (looser) monetary policy. In fact, if any policy response is warranted it would probably be the opposite of this, since higher oil prices cause slower broad economic growth and lower oil prices cause faster broad economic growth. (However, long time readers will know that I don’t believe monetary policy can affect growth significantly anyway.)
Back, briefly, to the BOJ balance sheet expansion story. This was a very significant event for global inflation, assuming as always that the body follows through with their stated intention. Money printing anywhere causes the equilibrium level of nominal prices globally to rise. To the extent that this inflation is to be felt idiosyncratically only in Japan, then the decline of the currency will offset the effect of this global increase in prices so that ex-Japan prices are steady while prices in Japan rise…which is the BOJ’s stated intent. Movements in foreign exchange are best understood as allocating global inflation between trading partners. However, for money-printing in Japan to lead to disinflation ex-Japan, the movement in the currency would have to over-react to the money printing. If markets are perfectly efficient, in other words, the movement in currency should cause the BOJ’s idiosyncratic actions to be felt only within Japan. There are arbitrage opportunities otherwise (although it is very slow and risky arbitrage – better thought of as arbitrage in an economic sense than in a trading sense).
Of course, if the BOJ money-printing is not idiosyncratic – if other central banks are also printing – then prices should rise around the world and currencies shouldn’t move. This is why the Fed was able to get away with increasing M2 significantly without cratering the dollar: everyone was doing it. What is interesting is that the global price level has not yet fully reflected the rise in the global money supply, because of the decline in global money velocity (which is due in turn to the decline in global interest rates). This is the story that is currently being written, and will be the big story of the next few years.
Meteorologists and Defenseless Receivers
The stock market really seemed to “want” to get to 2000 on the S&P. I hope it was worth it. Now as real yields seem to be moving higher once again (see chart below, source Bloomberg) – in direct contravention, it should be noted, of the usual seasonal trend which anticipates bond rallies in September and October – and the Fed is essentially fully ‘tapered’, market valuations are again going to be a topic of conversation as we head into Q4 just a few weeks from now.
To use an American football analogy, the stock market right now is in an extended position like a wide receiver reaching for a high pass, but with no rules in place to prevent the hitting of a defenseless receiver. This kind of stretch is what can get a player laid up for a while.
Now, it has been this way for a long time. And, like many other value investors, I have been wary of valuations for a long time. I want to make a distinction, though, between certain value investors and others. There are some who believe that the more a market gets overvalued, the more dramatic the ensuing fall must be. These folks get more and more animated and exercised the longer that the market crash doesn’t happened. I think that they have a point – a market which is 100% overvalued is in more perilous position than one which is a mere 50% overvalued. But we really must keep in mind the limits of our knowledge about the market. That is, while we can say the market is x% overvalued with respect to the Shiller PE or whatever our favorite metric is, and we can say that it is becoming more overextended than it previously was, we do not know where true fair value lies.
That is to say that it may be – I don’t think it is, but it’s possible – that when stocks are at a 20 Shiller PE (versus a long-term average of 16) they are not 25% overvalued but actually at fair value. Therefore, when they go to a 24 PE, they are more overvalued but instead of 50% overvalued they are only 25% overvalued because true fair value is, in this example, at 20. What this means is that knowing the Shiller PE went from 20 to 24 has no particular implications for the size of the eventual market break, because we don’t actually know that 16 really represents fair value. That’s an assumption, and an untestable assumption at that.
Now, we need assumptions. There is no way to keep from making assumptions in financial markets, and we do it every day. I happen to think that the notion that a 16 Shiller PE is roughly fair value is probably a good assumption. But my point is that when you’re talking about how much more overvalued a market is than it was previously, with the implication that the ensuing break ought to be larger, you need to remember that we are only guessing at fair value. Always. This is why you won’t catch me saying that I think the S&P will drop eventually to some specific figure, unless I’m eyeballing a chart or something. In my mind, my job is to talk about the probabilities of winning or losing and the expected value of those wagers. That is, harking back to the old Kelly Criterion thinking– we try to assess our edge and odds but we always have to remember we can’t know either for certain.
Bringing this back to inflation (it is, after all, CPI week): even though we can’t state with certainty what the odds of a particular outcome actually are, we can state what probability the market is placing on certain outcomes. In inflation space, we can look at the options market to infer the probability that market participants place on the odds of a certain inflation rate being realized over a certain time period (n.b. the market currently only offers options on headline inflation, which is somewhat less interesting than options on core inflation, but we can extract the latter information using other techniques. For this exercise, however, we are focusing on headline inflation.)
What the inflation options market tells us is that over the next year, market participants see only about an 18% chance that headline inflation will be above 2.25% (that is, roughly the Fed’s target, applied to CPI). This is despite the fact that headline inflation is already at 2%, and median inflation is at 2.2%. So the market is overwhelmingly of the opinion that inflation declines, or at least rises no further, from here. You can buy a one-year, 2.5% inflation cap for about 5-7bps, depending who you ask. That’s really amazing to me.
Looking out a few years (see table below, source Enduring Investments), we see that the market prices roughly a 50-50 chance of inflation being above the Fed’s target starting about three years from now (September 2016-September 2017, approximately), and for each year thereafter. But how long are the tails? The inflation caplet market says that there is no better than a 24% chance that any of the next 10 years sees inflation above 4%. We are not talking about core inflation, but headline inflation – so we are implicitly saying that there will be no spikes in gasoline, as well as no general rise in core inflation, in any year over the next decade. That strikes me as … optimistic, especially since our view is that core inflation will be well above 3% for calendar 2015.
| Probability that inflation is above | |||||
| in year | 2.25% | 3.00% | 4.00% | 5.00% | 6.00% |
| 1 | 18% | 5% | 3% | 1% | 0% |
| 2 | 41% | 19% | 8% | 3% | 1% |
| 3 | 46% | 25% | 11% | 5% | 3% |
| 4 | 50% | 31% | 15% | 7% | 4% |
| 5 | 52% | 35% | 18% | 10% | 6% |
| 6 | 50% | 35% | 19% | 11% | 7% |
| 7 | 50% | 36% | 21% | 13% | 8% |
| 8 | 49% | 37% | 22% | 14% | 9% |
| 9 | 48% | 37% | 23% | 15% | 10% |
| 10 | 47% | 37% | 24% | 16% | 11% |
What is especially interesting about this table is that the historical record says that high inflation is both more probable than we think, and that inflation tails tend to be much longer than we think. Over the last 100 years (since the Fed was founded, essentially), headline inflation has been above 4% fully 31% of the time. And the conditional probability that inflation was over 10%, given that it was over 4%, was 32%. In other words, once inflation exceeds 4%, there is a 1 in 3 chance, historically, that it goes above 10%.
Cautions remain the same as above: we cannot know the true probability of the event, either a priori or even in retrospect when the occurrence will be either probability=1 (it happened) or probability=0 (it didn’t). This is why it is so hard to evaluate meteorologists, and economists, after the fact! But in my view, the market is remarkably sanguine about the prospects for an inflation accident. To be fair, it has been sanguine…and correct…for a long time. But I think it is no longer a good bet for that streak to continue.
Setting Up For a CPI Surprise?
Heading into the CPI print tomorrow, the market is firmly in “we don’t believe it” mode. Since the CPI report last month – which showed a third straight month of a surprising and surprisingly-broad uptick in prices – commodity prices are actually down 4% (basis the Bloomberg Commodity Index, formerly known as the DJ-UBS Commodity Index). Ten-year breakeven inflation is up 1-2bps since then, but there is still scant sign of alarm in global markets about the chances that the inflation upswing has arrived.
Essentially, no one believes that inflation is about to take root. Few people believe that inflation can take root. Indeed, our measure of inflation angst is near all-time lows (see chart, source Enduring Investments).
…which, of course, is exactly the reason you ought to be worried: because no one else is, and that’s precisely the time that often offers the most risk to being with the crowd, and the most reward from bucking it. And, with 10-year breakevens around 2.22%, the cost of protecting against that risk is quite low.
I suspect that one reason some investors are less concerned about this month’s CPI is that some short-term indicators are indicating that a correction in prices may be due. For example, the Billion Prices Project (which is now Price Stats, but still makes a daily series available at http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/) monthly inflation chart (shown below) suggests that inflation should retreat this month.
However, hold your horses: the BPP is forecasting non-seasonally-adjusted headline CPI. The June seasonals do have the tendency to subtract a bit less than 0.1% from the seasonally-adjusted number, which means that it’s not a bad bet that the non-seasonally-adjusted figure will show a smaller rise from May to June than we saw April to May, or March to April. Moreover, the BPP and other short-term ‘nowcasts’ of headline inflation are partly ebbing due to the recent sogginess in gasoline prices, which are 10 cents lower (and unseasonally so) than they were a month ago.
But that does not inform on core inflation. The last three months’ prints of seasonally-adjusted core CPI have been 0.204%, 0.236%, and 0.258%, which is a 2.8% annualized pace for the last quarter…and accelerating. Moreover, as I have previously documented the breadth of the inflation uptick is something that is different from the last few times we have seen mild acceleration of inflation.
None of that means that monthly core CPI will continue to accelerate this month. The consensus forecast of 0.19% implies year/year core CPI will accelerate, but will still round to 2.0%. But remember that the Cleveland Fed’s Median CPI, to which core CPI should be converging as the sequester/Medical Care effect fades, is at 2.3% and rising. We should not be at all surprised with a second 0.3% increase tomorrow.
But, judging from markets, we would be.
This is not to say I am forecasting it, because forecasting one month’s CPI is like forecasting a random number generator, but I think the odds of 0.3% are considerably higher than 0.1%. I am on record as saying that core or median inflation will get to nearly 3% by year-end, and I remain in that camp.
Awareness of Inflation, But No Fear Yet
Suddenly, there is a bunch of talk about inflation. From analysts like Grant Williams to media outlets like MarketWatch and the Wall Street Journal (to be sure, the financial media still tell us not to worry about inflation and keep on buying ‘dem stocks, such as Barron’s argues here), and even Wall Street economists like those from Soc Gen and Deutsche Bank…just two name two of many Johnny-come-latelys.
It is a little surprising how rapidly the articles about possibly higher inflation started showing up in the media after we had a bottoming in the core measures. Sure, it was easy to project the bottoming in those core measures if you were paying attention to the base effects and noticing that the measures of central tendency that are more immune to those base effects never decelerated much (see median CPI), but still somehow a lot of people were taken by surprise if the uptick in media stories is any indication.
I actually have an offbeat read of that phenomenon, though. I think that many of these analysts, media outlets, and economists just want to have some record of being on the inflation story at a time they consider early. Interestingly enough, while there is no doubt that the volume of inflation coverage is up in the days since the CPI report, there is still no general alarm. The chart below from Google Trends shows the relative trend in the search term “rising inflation.” It has shown absolutely nothing since the early days of extraordinary central bank intervention.
Now, I don’t really care very much when the fear of inflation broadens. It is the phenomenon of inflation, not the fear of it, which causes the most damage to society. However, there is no doubt that the fear of inflation definitely could cause damage to markets much sooner than inflation itself can. The concern has been rising in narrow pockets of the markets where inflation itself is actually traded, but because we trade headline inflation the information has been obscured. The chart below (source: Enduring Investments) shows the 1-year headline inflation swap, in black, which has risen from about 1.4% to 2.2% since November. But the green line shows the implied core inflation extracted from those swap quotes, and that line has risen from 1.2% in December to 2.6% or so now. That is far more significant – 2.6% core inflation over the next year would mean core PCE would exceed 2% by next spring. This is a very reasonable expectation, but as I said it is still only a narrow part of the market that is willing to bet that way.
If I was long equities – which I am not, as our four-asset-class model currently has only a 7.4% weight in stocks – then I would keep an eye on the search terms and for other anecdotal evidence that inflation fears are starting to actually rise among investors, rather than just being the probably-cynical musings of people who don’t want to be seen as having missed the signs (even if they don’t really believe it).
Evaluating the New Kid
Part of the assessment of a new Federal Reserve Chairman always involves trying to figure out if the new person says particular things because they are wily, and cagey, or because they don’t really have a good idea of what they’re doing.
For example, when Chairman Bernanke said on “60 Minutes” that he was “100 percent” certain that the Fed could stop inflation from happening, some people thought he was being clever and projecting the great confidence that investors presumably needed to hear from the Fed Chairman at that time. I didn’t buy that, and rather thought that anyone associated with real-life financial markets (as opposed to models) would never attach a 100% probability to anything, and certainly not something that had never been tried. Subsequent events showed that the latter was probably closer to the truth, as the Fed went from reassuring the world that it could exit whenever it was warranted, to claiming that no exit – in the sense of needing to reduce its balance sheet – was necessary. That transition in message was largely due to the slowly-developing realization that in the real world, you can’t sell $2 trillion of securities as easily as you can buy them when the Treasury is going the same way.
We are going through a similar process of “market vetting” with Yellen. Her decision to stay the course on the taper – which is surely the right course – could be wise, or it could simply be that she doesn’t make decisions very quickly. It isn’t clear right now which of these is the case.
However, I find her recent talk about inflation to be disturbing. Yes, of course we all know that she is a dove. And, given her historical record on monetary policy topics, I don’t expect her to be as concerned as others (such as Allan Meltzer in today’s Wall Street Journal) are about the prospects for inflation – in other words, I expect her to be late and slow to respond. And that theme got no lack of support today, when Yellen remarked in testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, that “In light of the considerable degree of slack that remains in labor markets and the continuation of inflation below the Committee’s 2 percent objective, a high degree of monetary accommodation remains warranted.” Certainly, that is no surprise, and neither is her assertion (scary though it be) that “In particular, we anticipate that even after employment and inflation are near mandate-consistent levels, economic and financial conditions may, for some time, warrant keeping the target federal funds rate below levels that the Committee views as normal in the longer run.”
I’m not too keen when the Chairman basically promises to keep interest rates below neutral levels even when unemployment and inflation are at normal levels; that’s essentially a promise to raise inflation to a level higher than the Fed’s longer-term goal. Moreover, I am also unsure still whether the Chair is fully informed with respect to the current level and trajectory of inflation itself. It is soothing to hear her acknowledge that “inflation will begin to move up toward 2 percent” (headline inflation will exceed that level eight days from now, and median inflation is already above that standard so this isn’t a difficult projection for an economist) but Dr. Yellen seems to be unaware that the main reason that core PCE and CPI inflation is below 2% today is due to the fact that in April of last year, Medicare slashed prices paid to doctors due to sequester-induced cuts. Bernanke has noted this previously, and it isn’t exactly a state secret…then again, come to think of it state secrets aren’t what they used to be. But talking about persistent inflation below 2%, when there is very little chance of that, makes me wonder whether she’s really attuned to what is happening with prices. CPI and PCE are not the right indicators to be looking at right now – a point also made clearly by the deviation over the last year of PriceStats inflation from CPI inflation (see chart, source PriceStats).
If it were Bernanke talking, we would assume that he knows where the numbers actually are and is just trying to talk the market to his way of thinking. Greenspan was a notorious numbers wonk so there is no doubt that he would know the context of what he’s talking about. But with the new Chair, we don’t really know. It may be that, since she knows she’s keeping rates down for a long time regardless of what happens, she isn’t getting too fine about the details right now. Or it may be that she is alarmed and doesn’t want to let on (I doubt this). It might even be that she doesn’t really know much about inflation, and given her past remarks on the subject of LSAP and policy stimulus – linked to above – that is a possibility we cannot truly refute at this point.
The Fed is already a year or more behind schedule when it comes to removing accommodation in time to prevent an uptick in inflation. I am looking for evidence that they know that inflation will not arrest the moment they decide they are concerned, but I can’t find it. This should worry us all.
Deserving It
Does Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson deserve another chance?
That’s a question I saw several times bandied about today on the NFL Network. (It is, after all, kickoff night of the NFL and so you will perhaps forgive the digression.) But no one seemed to ask the question that I find much more interesting, and more relevant in other familiar contexts as well:
Does any other team deserve to be saddled with Ochocinco for another season?
Because really, it isn’t just a question of whether he deserves another chance. That would imply there is some objective standard by which his ‘deservedness’ should be measured. It seems to me that this begs the question. Shouldn’t the arbiters of whether he deserves another chance be the people who actually have to be saddled with the consequences of giving him another chance?
I’m just saying…
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There is a very interesting development in inflation land: Deutsche Bank, which along with Credit Suisse distanced themselves from less-innovative firms earlier this year when they issued ETN/ETF structures that allow an investor to invest in a long-breakeven position, has created a tradeable index that proxies core inflation.
Now, it isn’t any mystery that you can create core inflation by taking headline inflation and stripping out energy (and, if you feel like torturing yourself with tiny futures positions, food) – for example, I presented a chart of ‘implied core inflation’ in the article linked here – so the DB product doesn’t break any new theoretical ground. But it is a huge leap forward in that it allows more market participants to trade in a direct way something that acts like core inflation.
Why would an investor care about core inflation? Is it because he “doesn’t care about buying gasoline and food”? No, an investor may wish to buy a core-inflation-linked bond for the same reason that a Fed governor wants to focus on core even though all prices matter: core inflation moves around less in the short run, but in the long run core and headline inflation move together. The chart below (Source: Bloomberg) shows the core CPI price index, and the headline CPI price index, normalized so that they were both 100 on December 31, 1979. Since then, prices have tripled, whether you are looking at headline or core. The difference in the compounded inflation rate? Core inflation has risen at a 3.471% inflation rate, while headline inflation has grown at 3.415%.
This is why central bankers want to focus on core – headline provides lots of noise but almost no signal. And it’s the same reason that investors should prefer bonds linked to core inflation: you get virtually all of the long-term protection against inflation that you do with headline-inflation-linked bonds (like TIPS), but with much lower short-term volatility.
Now, Deutsche’s index isn’t truly core inflation, but a proxy thereof. It appears to be a decent proxy, but it is still a proxy (and we have some more theoretical/quantitative critiques that are beyond the scope of this column). And their product is a swap, not a bond (although it would not surprise me to see bonds linked to this index in the very near future). So it isn’t perfect – but it is a huge step forward, and Deutsche Bank (and Allan Levin, the guy there who has the vision) deserves praise for actually innovating. Innovation tends to happen on the buy side, and with smaller firms, not with big sell-side institutions, and we should cheer it when we see it.
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Now, back to actual markets: tomorrow, the ECB is expected to announce a new program of buying periphery bonds when necessary. Actually, it is a bit more than expectation, since the plan was leaked today. Supposedly, the ECB will announce that they are going to do “unlimited, sterilized bond buying” of securities three years and less in maturity.
The Euro was somewhat buoyed by this news. The idea is that big bond purchases will bring down sovereign yields, but sterilization of the purchases will mean that it isn’t truly monetization and therefore not inflationary.
This seems ridiculous to me. I am not surprised at the idea that the ECB would conduct large purchases of bonds that no one else seems to want; they did quite a bit of that with Greece, after all. But I’ve lost track – are they still sterilizing the billions in bonds that they’ve already bought, as well as the two LTRO operations which they claimed to sterilize, but never explicitly did except through the expedient of paying interest on reserves to sop up the liquidity?
How are they going to sterilize more purchases? There are basically three straightforward ways for a central bank to remove liquidity from the market. We used to think that there were only two, because the only ways the central bank ever did it was to (a) conduct large reverse-repurchase operations in which the central bank lent bonds and borrowed cash, taking the cash temporarily out of the economy and (b) to sell bonds outright, to make a permanent reduction in reserves. Now we recognize a third option, although we’re not sure how efficacious it is: (c) raising the interest rate on deposits of excess reserves at the central bank, so as to discourage the multiplication of those reserves.
But for the ECB’s purchases to be effective in terms of their size, they will be far too large to use reverse-repos as a sterilization method; and it doesn’t seem to make much sense to be selling bonds when they’re buying other bonds, unless they want to try and push up the yields of countries like the Netherlands and Germany (which might not be politically too astute) at the same time that they’re lowering the yields of Spain and Portugal. And they just cut the deposit rate to zero in July…are they going to raise it again?
I can understand the political cleverness of such an announcement, if the ECB makes it: make the bond buys “unlimited” to suggest that they can’t be outmuscled, but also sterilized so it’s not printing. But these can’t both be true – because there is not unlimited capacity for sterilization.
That plan can only work if, in fact, the ECB doesn’t actually buy many bonds. In the past, they’ve tried to trick the market into rallying with “bazooka-like” comments so that they didn’t actually have to do anything. To date, it has never worked. I doubt this will, either.
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Back in the U.S., the wave of Employment data is about to hit. Tomorrow morning, Initial Claims (Consensus: 370k) will be released; about Claims the only thing I want to note is that while it is down considerably from the peak of the most-recent recession, it is only slightly below where it was at the peak of the last recession. Over the last 52 weeks, Claims have averaged 381k; in May of 2002 that average reached 419k. Also due out tomorrow is the ADP report (Consensus: 140k), which is expected to weaken slightly from last month’s figure. On Friday, of course, the Payrolls report is expected to show a rise of 127k new jobs with the Unemployment Rate steady at 8.3%.
Some observers have made a lot of the fact that the Citigroup Economic Surprise index has risen from -65 or so in July to nearly flat now. But this is not a sign of improving economic conditions; it is a sign of improving economic forecasts. Remember that this index doesn’t capture absolute levels, but the degree to which economists are missing. The current level is near flat because economists adapted their forecasts to the weak data, not because the data improved to catch up with the over-optimistic forecasts. I wouldn’t draw much relief from that indicator.
Now, with the ECB and the Fed on the calendar over the next week, markets may well get some relief. But the economy, not so much, even if we do deserve it.
Inflation: As ‘Contained’ As An Arrow From A Bow
Is 15 months in a row of rising core inflation ‘contained?’
Year-on-year core CPI has now risen for 15 consecutive months. At some point, it will seem reasonable to let it have a month off, but until now it hasn’t needed it. Fifteen months in a row. That’s impressive. It’s so impressive, in fact, that it hasn’t happened since 1973-1974, when prices were catching up from the failed experiment of price controls imposed by President Nixon in 1971-73. Core inflation has never, in the history of the data (which exists since 1957), accelerated for 16 consecutive months. So, next month we have a chance for a record!
Headline inflation was softer-than-expected by 0.1%, even as the NSA CPI index itself came in higher-than-expected. As I pointed out yesterday, that was a semi-predictable consequence of the change to new seasonal adjustment factors. Core inflation was 0.218% month-on-month, however, which actually generated a rise in the rounded year-on-year index to 2.3% (2.277% to three decimal places). The table below shows the evolution of the year-on-year changes for the eight major subgroups from 6 months ago to 3 months ago to last month, to now.
| Weights | y/y change | prev y/y change | 3m y/y chg | 6m y/y chg | |
| All items |
100.0% |
2.925% |
2.962% |
3.525% |
3.629% |
| Food and beverages |
15.0% |
4.212% |
4.452% |
4.470% |
4.001% |
| Housing |
40.2% |
1.876% |
1.874% |
1.869% |
1.453% |
| Apparel |
3.5% |
4.664% |
4.573% |
4.194% |
3.056% |
| Transportation |
16.5% |
4.961% |
5.197% |
9.185% |
11.980% |
| Medical care |
6.9% |
3.605% |
3.491% |
3.116% |
3.199% |
| Recreation |
5.9% |
1.372% |
1.027% |
0.253% |
-0.173% |
| Education and communication |
6.7% |
1.838% |
1.670% |
1.371% |
0.982% |
| Other goods and services |
5.3% |
1.740% |
1.701% |
1.660% |
0.847% |
Compared to last month, Apparel, Medical Care, Recreation, and Education/Communication accelerated, groups which total 23% of the consumption basket. Transportation and Food & Beverages both decelerated, and they total 31.5% of the basket. Now, notice that Transportation and Food & Beverages are the two groups that are most affected by direct commodity costs – energy and food, respectively. So…don’t get too excited by the deceleration there, although new and used motor vehicles and other components of Transportation also decelerated and that doesn’t have much to do with energy prices. In Food & Beverages, “Food at home” is decelerating (about 57% of the Food & beverages category) while “Food away from home” and “Alcoholic beverages” (the balance of the category) are accelerating.
Yes, you can get eyestrain looking too closely at these figures, but doing so does help.
For example, one theme I think the Fed is counting on is that the “Housing” component of CPI is expected to decelerate due to the still-high inventory of unsold homes and the fact that foreclosure sales can now proceed. It has been a conundrum why rents have been rising while home prices stagnate (actually, not much of a conundrum: there is an underlying inflation dynamic that in the case of the housing-asset market is being overwhelmed by a decline in multiples. But this is a conundrum to the Fed, and to be fair I also expected Housing inflation to be lower than it has been recently). And in this month’s data, you can see that the year-on-year increase in Housing CPI flattened out. But, as the table below shows, the Shelter component wasn’t what flattened out. Housing only went sideways because the “Fuels and Utilities” component declined – again, a commodity effect.
| Weights | y/y change | prev y/y change | 3m y/y chg | 6m y/y chg | |
| Housing |
40.2% |
1.876% |
1.874% |
1.869% |
1.453% |
| Shelter |
30.92% |
1.983% |
1.905% |
1.792% |
1.399% |
| Fuels and utilities |
5.27% |
1.941% |
2.432% |
3.483% |
3.201% |
| Household furnishings and operations |
4.03% |
1.035% |
1.000% |
0.561% |
-0.224% |
I still expect Housing inflation to level out and probably to decline, but so far those expectations have been dashed. It will be uncomfortable for the Fed if it remains this way; a significant part of their expectations for a visually-contained core inflation number is (mathematically) due to the expectation that housing inflation isn’t going to keep rising. As you can see in the chart below (Source: Enduring Investments http://www.enduringinvestments.com), the rest of core inflation outside of Shelter is continuing to rise. Inflation is not ‘contained’, except maybe for housing. Maybe.
I am fairly confident, though, that if Housing inflation does not decelerate as expected, then the Fed will find some other reason to ignore the very clear acceleration in inflation. The economists at the FRB are for the most part true believers in the notion that the output gap constrains any possible acceleration in inflation, despite ample evidence that output gaps don’t matter (or, anyway, matter far less than monetary variables). For another view of this proposition, see the Chart below, taken from this article by economist John Cochrane.
Fed economists also feel strongly that “well-anchored inflation expectations” means that they can ignore 15-month trends in core inflation, despite the fact that by Chairman Bernanke’s own admission we aren’t really very good at measuring inflation expectations (to be kind).
They have time. The Fed has recently begun to treat 2% (on core PCE, not core CPI) as more of a floor than a target, so it will be some months, even if core inflation doesn’t pause for a month or two pretty soon, before the Committee starts getting at all warm under the collar about inflation. Even then, they are extremely unlikely to take steps to reduce liquidity while Unemployment remains high. The Fed is in a political bind, and the only easy path for them is to “see no evil” on inflation while hoping that Unemployment drops swiftly enough for them to act before prices really get out of hand. We will see.
The Inflation Trend Is Not Yet “Tamed”
“Inflation Unlikely to Be a Cause for Concern,” expressed the Wall Street Journal today. “The cost of oil, metals, and grains would have to jump another 20% to 30% in coming months [my note: actually, just oil] to trigger a repeat run-up in consumer prices next year. Absent that, headline inflation rates are poised to weaken.”
“U.S. Consumer Prices Stagnate as Fuel Costs Show Inflation Tamed” said the headline on Bloomberg.
Why the sudden emphasis on headline inflation, now that it’s converging back to core? Why are pundits abruptly myopically focused on fuel, which is 9.1% of the consumption basket (although a good part of its volatility)? I would suggest that this spin on the headline derives from the fact that economic prognosticators have been saying for some time that the slow global growth will keep inflation contained, and so they are beginning to obsess about the parts of the price index that appear contained even if they are not the important parts of the index.
Meanwhile, core inflation rose +0.173%, bumping the year/year rise in core inflation to 2.153%. Both were above expectations. Look at the chart of core inflation, below, and objectively try and decide if that looks like a “tamed” inflation trend. To me, it looks like a trending trend.
Tame? Only if you're already assuming the trend stops.
The last time year/year core inflation was 2.2% was in October 2008. It took exactly 2 years to decelerate to a low of 0.6% in October 2010. It took 13 months to return to the level. And as the chart makes clear, it has been a straight shot. Year-on-year core inflation has not fallen in a single month since October 2008.
It isn’t as if this rise is being caused by wages, or by medical care, or by fuel. While the second story below takes pains to blame it on “higher medical care and clothing costs”, in fact most of the basket is accelerating. The table below shows the eight major subgroups.
| Weights | y/y change | prev y/y change | 1y ago y/y change | |
| All items |
100.0% |
3.394% |
3.525% |
1.143% |
| Food and beverages |
14.8% |
4.373% |
4.470% |
1.496% |
| Housing |
41.5% |
1.918% |
1.869% |
0.010% |
| Apparel |
3.6% |
4.763% |
4.194% |
-0.790% |
| Transportation |
17.3% |
8.024% |
9.185% |
3.750% |
| Medical care |
6.6% |
3.370% |
3.116% |
3.184% |
| Recreation |
6.3% |
0.348% |
0.253% |
-0.862% |
| Education and communication |
6.4% |
1.418% |
1.371% |
1.590% |
| Other goods and services |
3.5% |
1.858% |
1.660% |
1.840% |
From last month, acceleration in the year-on-year rate happened in Housing, Apparel, Medical Care, Recreation, Education & Communication, and Other, totaling 67.9% of the basket, while Food & Beverages and Transportation (mostly due to energy), 32.1% of the basket combined, decelerated. And, from 6 months ago (shown below), every major group has accelerated its year-on-year trend except Transportation (again, because of energy prices) even though the headline inflation rate itself has fallen.
| Weights | y/y change | 6m ago y/y chg | |
| All items |
100.0% |
3.394% |
3.569% |
| Food and beverages |
14.8% |
4.373% |
3.363% |
| Housing |
41.5% |
1.918% |
1.159% |
| Apparel |
3.6% |
4.763% |
1.045% |
| Transportation |
17.3% |
8.024% |
13.098% |
| Medical care |
6.6% |
3.370% |
2.995% |
| Recreation |
6.3% |
0.348% |
-0.022% |
| Education and communication |
6.4% |
1.418% |
1.029% |
| Other goods and services |
3.5% |
1.858% |
1.517% |
This bears repeating. There has been a 5% fall in the year-on-year rate of inflation in 17.3% of the basket. That causes an 0.88% drag on the headline number. But the headline number only dropped from 3.569% to 3.394%, because every other major group accelerated.
You can call that “tamed” if you want to. I will say that it is surprising our models, which a year ago only expected core inflation to be in the 1.6%-1.8% at year-end 2011. Housing inflation in particular has remained surprisingly high despite inventories which should be pressuring rents and home prices. And yet, prices are rising. There is just no sign of deceleration in core inflation at this point, although core inflation ex-housing rose only to 2.37% and will probably only be around 2.6% by year-end, a trifle lower than we were expecting two months ago.
This is not a growth story. While economic data on Thursday was better-than-expected, with another eyebrow-raising decline in Initial Claims and better-than-expected readings from Empire Manufacturing and Philly Fed, recovery today (such as it is) doesn’t affect inflation today. Inflation, if it responds to growth at all, is supposed to respond with a lag. So that’s not what is happening here.
The best candidate continues to be money and lending. M2 on Thursday night bounded ahead again, pushing the 52-week change up to +9.6%, and the 52-week rise in Commercial Bank Credit reached 2.5% for the first time since November 2008. The chart below shows both the rise in Commercial Bank Credit and the contemporaneous rise in CPI for the last few years. CPI seems to respond to changes in credit with a 6-12-month lag.
Commercial Bank Credit vs Core CPI - related, or at least both related to a third thing.
Well, I am not saying these things are necessarily causally related because if we trace this back to the early 1980s the fit is less persuasive, but I suspect there is a causal link which becomes more apparent when other factors are muted. It certainly fits with theory that money and lending should impact prices.
Assessing all of the data, I cannot see how a neutral observer can look at current price trends as being “tame” or “stagnated,” and I can easily see how inflation might become a cause for concern…even if it isn’t already.
