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Inflation Deceleration Continues – But Not Enough

June 18, 2024 3 comments

[A version of this article first appeared in last month’s Quarterly Inflation Outlook, available at https://inflationguy.blog/shop/]

Core and Median inflation continue to decline. This is not really a surprise; since early 2023 the clear direction has been to lower inflation. The debate has not been about whether inflation was heading higher or lower. The debate has been about whether the downtrend was going to converge on 2% as the Fed’s target, or fall short of that level. For at least that long, my position has been that median inflation would settle in the “high 3s/low 4s.” To date, nothing has happened to change that view.

In fact, it cannot escape notice that inflation has been coming down a lot more slowly than it went up. When the initial spike happened, certainly the ‘transitory’ crowd expected inflation would fall at least as rapidly as it went up, and even many of those who correctly understood that the underlying dynamics were not accidents of fate but the results of terrible policy thought that the return round-trip would take roughly the same amount of time as the outbound leg. But that hasn’t happened. The softening of inflation has been more reluctant than was the upward thrust. This is partly because, since the initial move in prices was not transitory, it kicked off a feedback loop: so wages went up to reflect the pressures that workers were feeling, and that fed back into inflation.

For Median CPI, the sharp acceleration took off from August 2021 at 2.4% and extended 18 months until it reached 7.1% in February 2023. In the 15 months since then, median has declined only to 4.3%, and this rate of improvement appears to be flattening out rather than accelerating.

On Core CPI, the difference has been more striking. The jump from 1.6% y/y to 6.5% y/y took 12 months, from March 2021 to March 2022. Since the actual 6.6% high in September 2022, we have had 20 months of declining inflation and core is only back to 3.4%.

The optimistic view is that we have had more months of decelerating inflation than we had of accelerating inflation. The more realistic view, especially considering that Median CPI hadn’t been above 3.33% for 28 years prior to COVID (and Core, not above 3.1%) is that inflation is converging to the mean…but to a different mean. This is what I have argued (for a long time) was happening: the perturbation to the former equilibrium displaced the whole distribution to a new equilibrium (“high 3s, low 4s”). We are now getting data that seems to support this notion.

One important characteristic of mean-reverting series is that the amount of mean-reversion “pressure” is related to the distance of the current point from the mean. That is, when inflation is far away from the mean, it tends to revert more quickly and when it is closer to the mean the pressure to converge is less. The general form of a mean-reverting series1 is:

In this equation, the economic variable is represented by the time series S, the long-term mean is μ, and the mean reversion rate is k.2 Because there is also random noise, and because many economic series don’t tend to see large perturbations on a regular basis, it is not a trivial thing to pick out the long-term mean and the reversion coefficient from the noise. But the point is that such series, when they are strongly perturbed, initially spring back rapidly but then gradually slow how much they are rebounding, until they approach the mean. That certainly looks like what we have here. The chart below shows core and median CPI, but from the point of the shock to new highs I have added ‘mean reversion lines’ where the long-term mean is taken to be 4% for Median CPI and 3.5% for Core CPI, and the mean reversion coefficient is taken to be 0.12 in each case.3

There are lots of different combinations that can produce plausible dynamics, and my point isn’t to claim that these are the right parameters. I am merely trying to illustrate that the recent behavior looks like a series that is mean reverting to new, higher means.

(For what it’s worth, if you want to see why most economists last year thought that we would be back at target inflation in late 2023/early 2024, use 2% for μ. In that case, inflation starts down much more steeply than we actually saw, and doesn’t flatten out until lower levels of inflation.)

Why is the rate of improvement slowing? It is slowing because the easiest improvements have already happened. For example, core goods inflation has declined from over 12% to -1.7% y/y. That’s great news – but the first 14% of disinflation is surely the easiest! Other, stickier parts of the CPI, such as shelter and ‘supercore’, are coming down more slowly (shelter) or not at all (supercore, which is at the same level it first reached in March 2022). In the conventional view, this is “improvement that is waiting to happen.” But if overall core/median inflation is converging to a higher mean, then these improvements will be mostly offset by an increase in core goods inflation from -1.7% to, say, 0%.

The road gets harder from here, and that’s what the decelerating deceleration is telling us!

  1. I’ve excised the complicated-looking, but irrelevant for this discussion, symbology for the noise term so as not to perturb readers too far from their means. ↩︎
  2. Worth pointing out, since I have used the ‘spring’ analogy to explain the behavior of money velocity, is that the ‘pressure’ part of this equation is identical to the physics of a spring, where F=-kx and x is displacement. ↩︎
  3. Actually, I’ve also removed the recursion – that is, the dotted line isn’t based on the most-recent S, but on the starting S and then thereafter on the calculated S. It would be what your mean-reversion-inspired forecast would look like, from the initial point. ↩︎
Categories: CPI Tags: , ,

Summary of My Post-CPI Tweets (September 2022)

October 13, 2022 8 comments

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

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

  • It’s CPI Day – and here we go again!
  • A reminder to subscribers of the path here: At 8:30ET, when the data drops, I’ll be pulling that in and will post a number of charts and numbers, in fairly rapid-fire succession. Then I will retweet some of those charts with comments attached. Then I’ll run some other charts.
  • Afterwards (hopefully 9:15ish) I will have a private conference call for subscribers where I’ll quickly summarize the numbers.
  • After my comments on the number, I will post a partial summary at https://inflationguy.blog and later will podcast a summary at inflationguy.podbean.com . Busy day for the IG.
  • Thanks again for subscribing! And now for the walkup.
  • Last month, we again had a large upward surprise. Median CPI actually had its highest m/m print of the entire debacle-to-date. While y/y numbers are the big focus in the media, until we have a convincing peak in Median CPI we can’t really say the inflation pressures are receding!
  • Median CPI has moved back above core; this means that for the first time since April 2021 the longer tails are to the downside (the distribution skews lower, so the average is lower than the median).
  • If this is still true once inflation levels out a little bit, it will be encouraging. In inflationary cycles, the outliers show up on the high side and core moves above median. In disinflationary cycles, the opposite is true. Let’s give it some time and see what happens.
  • Rents in last month’s report were big, and though Used Cars set back a little bit New Cars had a big up. But the BIG eye-opener was the rise in core services less rents.
  • I wrote last month: “If core services ex-shelter is really taking the baton from core goods, that’s really bad news. Because core services ex-shelter is where wage pressure really lives. If you want a wage-price spiral, look in core services ex-shelter to see if it’s happening.”
  • So that is my main focus in this report. More later but let’s look at the consensus figures going in. Consensus for headline CPI is 0.21%/8.09%, while consensus for core CPI is 0.43%/6.52%. That will be a small acceleration in core (again).
  • For my money, the implied drag for food and energy (0.22%) looks slightly too large, and the interbank market seems to agree with an implied headline number of about 0.26% m/m. But I also think the core might come in a teensy bit lower than 0.4%.
  • I don’t know if what I am looking at would be enough to round it lower, but an 0.3% core print would make the markets very excited and COULD make the Fed favor a smaller move at this meeting. Not only because of 0.3%, but because things are starting to break.
  • …and the Fed’s models say that inflation should be slowing, so…why not taper the tightening? I think we MIGHT be having that discussion later this morning.
  • Certainly, the mkts have let the Fed go pretty far without throwing up a stop sign. 2y rates +72bps in the last month and 10y rates +54bps? Tens at 3.90% are pretty close to a long-term fair number (still a trifle low) after YEARS of being too low. Naturally, we could overshoot!
  • The decline in forward breakevens is very curious – I don’t see any sign that 2.25%-2.5% as a long-term equilibrium is still the attractor we will drift back to. The fun house mirror is broken for good I think.
  • So where do I see some potential softness? Our models have rents leveling off – not peaking per se, but leveling off – and that means that a trend projection of last month’s number might be overdone. Of course, those are just models.
  • More important (and obvious to many) is the decline in Used Cars prices. Last month, Used were a small drag but New cars added a bunch. We could still get the bump in New, but Used ought to be a decent drag based on the Blackbook figures.
  • But as an aside, this goes back to the error being made by a whole lot of people and politicians especially. See that last chart? Does it say “used car prices are coming back down and reverting, now that supply chain issues have cleared up? NO.
  • It’s a mistake, the same one people are making in rents & home prices. Rates of change could mean-revert. Prices will not. Prices are permanently higher, b/c the amount of money in the system is permanently higher. This chart shows the price level. Not going back to the old days.
  • Politicians saying inflation should ebb soon SEEM to be telling constituents that prices are going back down. At least, that’s what the constituents hear. They will be mad when the politicians say “see?” and they see all prices 30% higher than pre-COVID.
  • (I actually think something similar may be the root of a lot of conspiracy theories about how the government ‘cooks’ the numbers. They’re just talking past each other, with one talking price level and one talking rate of change.)
  • And speaking of money in the system – money supply growth has come to a screeching halt over the last few months, which is great news. Unfortunately, we are still catching up to the prior increase in money, which is why it will take a while for inflation rates to come back down.
  • There’s still work to do. Anyway, a lot of that is wayyyy beyond the trading implications for today’s figure. The key for me is to look past used cars and rents, and look at CORE SERVICES EX RENTS. That’s one of our “four pieces” that you’ll see in a few minutes.
  • If there’s softness in core, it will be taken well by both stocks and bonds and while I might fade stocks in a day or two, I’m not sure I’d fade a rate rally at least at the short end. If I’m wrong, and the core number is HIGHER…it could get pretty ugly. Liquidity is bad.
  • That’s all for the walk-up. Ten minutes until kickoff. Good luck today and thanks again for subscribing! Charts will launch a minute or two after 8:30, assuming data drops on time at the BLS.
  • welllllp. Not soft!
  • m/m CPI: 0.386% m/m Core CPI: 0.576%
  • Further: Primary Rents 0.84% M/M, 7.21% Y/Y (6.74% last) OER 0.81% M/M, 6.68% Y/Y (6.29% last) Lodging Away From Home -1% M/M, 2.9% Y/Y (4% last)
  • Last 12 core figures. About the same as last month. And if you exclude the two little dips, the other 12 are all pretty much 0.58% ish. That’s uncomfortable stability! Don’t want to see that. Comps get tougher going forward so core might not go up much more…but no sign of down.
  • Here is my early and automated guess at Median CPI for this month: 0.667%
  • Now, Median stepped down so that’s good news…but 0.667% m/m is not terrific. This is still the third-highest m/m in the last 40 years or so!
  • M/M, Y/Y, and prior Y/Y for 8 major subgroups
  • In the major subgroups, the drop in apparel stands out. The dollar’s strength is definitely affecting goods prices, and Apparel is one place where we see that most clearly.
  • Core Goods: 6.63% y/y Core Services: 6.65% y/y
  • It’s cute to see Core Goods and Core Services kissing. We know that goods are eventually going to go back down to 0-3%…especially if the dollar remains strong.
  • Primary Rents: 7.21% y/y OER: 6.68% y/y
  • This is a surprise – a further acceleration in rents. Economists might look past this, because with home prices leveling off rents won’t keep shooting higher and higher. Will they? Our model has a peak happening but if wages keep rising then rents need not decline, just slow.
  • Some ‘COVID’ Categories: Airfares 0.84% M/M (-4.62% Last) Lodging Away from Home -1.04% M/M (0.08% Last) Used Cars/Trucks -1.07% M/M (-0.1% Last) New Cars/Trucks 0.67% M/M (0.84% Last)
  • In the covid categories, Used Cars was in fact a drag. And New Cars was in fact a bump higher. There have been some big stories recently about markups for new trucks etc so this isn’t a surprise. But again, core goods will eventually decelerate.
  • Piece 1: Food & Energy: 14.2% y/y
  • Again Food & Energy is decelerating, but again it’s not as much as expected BECAUSE food, which we ordinarily mostly ignore, keeps rising. 10.8% y/y on Food & Beverages!
  • Piece 2: Core Commodities: 6.63% y/y
  • Piece 3: Core Services less Rent of Shelter: 6.62% y/y
  • Soooo…this is the piece that’s sort of ugly and I was worried about this. Core services less rent-of-shelter continues to accelerate. Medical Care was another 0.77% m/m, with Hospital Services 0.66% m/m. I’ll look at some of the other categories in a bit.
  • Piece 4: Rent of Shelter: 6.68% y/y
  • Core ex-housing (not just core services ex-housing) rose to 6.7% y/y. It had gotten as low as 6.04% two months ago but is reaccelerating. We know core goods is decelerating so the upward lift is core services ex-housing. And as I noted, that’s bad.
  • I forgot to mention that the median category was New Vehicles. As always with my Median CPI estimate, I caution that I have to estimate the seasonals on the OER subindices and if I’m off, and an OER category is near the median, then my Median guess might be off too.
  • Food AT HOME was 0.6% m/m (SA), 12.98% y/y. That’s slightly lower than it has been. Food AWAY FROM HOME, though, was +0.94% m/m, 8.48% y/y. This is bad – food commodities are leveling off a little, but wages show up in food away from home.
  • This number could have been worse. Airfares being -4.62% m/m helped. Airfares are largely driven indirectly by jet fuel, but had been positive last month so this is a catch-up. However, jet fuel is probably not going to go down much futher.
  • Conclusions: (a) this number is worse than expected. And not from little ‘I don’t care’ one-off things. (b) Where wages show up in the economy, we are seeing more inflation pressure show up in CPI. That’s not evidence a wage-price spiral has begun, but it is suggestive.
  • (c) since in yesterday’s FOMC minutes, participants had been musing about the risk of a wage-price spiral, this is especially salient right now. (d) This seals 75bps. They won’t do 100bps, and this report doesn’t let them do 50bps.
  • (e) This MAY raise the terminal rate. We will get more inflation data, but median CPI isn’t showing a deceleration and the m/m core is pretty solid at a 7%-ish rate (0.58%/mo) with occasional dips. Need at least 2 dip months.
  • (f) The deceleration in core goods is already happening. It has been happening. The dollar’s strength will help it to continue. But the acceleration in core services is more durable and not dollar-sensitive.
  • (g) it’s also not particularly rate-sensitive. (h) Higher wages also support higher rent growth. I am surprised at the extent of the strength in rents but put that (somewhat) in the wage-price spiral camp.
  • And finally (i) inflation markets are ridiculously mispriced. There is no reason to think that 2.25%-2.5% is the fair bet for 10-year inflation, especially when it’s going to be at 5% or above for the first 2 years of that 10 years. This is going to take a while.
  • I’m going to do a quick call right now and present my thoughts. Dial-in is <<redacted>> and Access Code <<redacted>>.
  • I will throw another housing-related chart here. Here is OER in red, against two home-price indices that are often used to model rents as a lagged function of home prices. The leveling-off should happen soon. BUT>>
  • …BUT the betas have changed and OER is higher than we would have expected based on the prior relationship. Those regressions were all based on nominal changes, not real…part of home price increase should be pass-through of value of real property, greater when infl is higher.
  • Either way, the timing suggests we should level off, and if you believe this model then in 6-12 months rents should be in sharp retreat. Maybe. But like I say, things have changed from the 2001-2020 baseline!

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

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

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

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

Categories: CPI, Federal Reserve, Tweet Summary, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , ,