The easy answer for “muted” inflation is consumers. Forget the unemployment rate debate. Let’s assume that labor markets are tight. Workers are scarce and companies have to compete, and pay up, to secure labor. Input costs are rising. That doesn’t necessarily guarantee an accelerating CPI or PCE Deflator. There is a final step in the Fed’s recovery process. Those labor-driven [...]
Milton Friedman was right about a lot of things. He was wrong about quite a bit, too. The stuff where he erred is what central banks now do in his name. The activist central bank is an outgrowth of monetarism, the academic approach to rethinking the Great Depression after Friedman and Anna Schwartz published A Monetary History. Toward the end [...]
At the end of last week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported data on US Personal Income and Spending that hit every sour note. There was the lowest inflation rate, the deflator to those spending figures, in years as well as the clear need to officially anoint a successor to the Verizon madness. The release also featured residual seasonality, and, [...]
As an alternate member of the FOMC, Lorretta Mester has been sounding off on inflation. When the payroll report for the month of August 2018 was released early in September, Mester as President of the Cleveland Fed was widely quoted for her “hawkish” stance. Referencing the highest wage growth in a decade, speaking in Boston she said, “Today’s [jobs] report [...]
Last August, the Senate confirmed Richard Clarida for both a position on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors as well as to be installed as its Vice Chairman. Clarida had been chairman of the Economics department at Columbia as well as working for PIMCO where he had served the investment company as its Global Strategic Advisor since 2006. You can [...]
What gets them into trouble is how they just can’t help themselves. Go back one year, to early 2018. Last February it was all-but-assured (in mainstream coverage) that the US economy was going to take off. The bond market, meaning UST’s, was about to be massacred because the overheating boom would force a double shot down its throat. Not only [...]
The unemployment rate isn’t just misleading in the US, though the gap between what it suggests here and what isn’t happening is now enormous. This idea of a labor shortage, or LABOR SHORTAGE!!!! as each case may be, was itself as global as synchronized growth when it showed up in later 2017. There were stories about Chinese factories unable to [...]
US inflation in January 2019 was, according to the CPI, the lowest in years. At just 1.55% year-over-year, the index hadn’t suggested this level since September 2016 right at the outset of what would become Reflation #3. Having hyped expectations over that interim, US policymakers now have to face the repercussions of unwinding the hysteria. Live by oil, now die [...]
It’s been awhile since we’ve had any data on the US economy. With the federal government having been shut down, especially the Census Bureau, the figures have gone dark. The current short-term government reopening will lead to an eventual rush of estimates, perhaps a few series that will be updated two months at a time. In lieu of all that, [...]
Today was supposed to see the release of the Census Bureau’s retail trade report, a key data set pertaining to the (alarming) state of American consumers, therefore workers by extension (income). With the federal government in partial shutdown, those numbers will be delayed until further notice. In their place we will have to manage with something like the Federal Reserves’ [...]
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