Category Archives: monetary policy

Does the Fed Deserve Credit for the Disinflation?

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November 19, 2023 —  The Bureau of Labor Statistics on November 14, remarkably, announced that the US CPI had been unchanged in October (whether seasonally adjusted or not).  That is, the level of the CPI was unchanged, not the inflation rate, which was zero.  Of course, single-month numbers are too volatile to draw much of a conclusion.  Not every month will see the price of gasoline plunge by 5.0 %, as it did from September to October.

More informatively, the headline CPI inflation rate over the last 12 months was 3.2 %, far down from 6.5 % in 2022.  At the risk of tempting fate, one might say that the inflation battle is being won. read more

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The End of Zero Interest Rates?

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August 14, 2023 — What a difference a year makes!  In 2021, interest rates were close to zero in the US and the UK,  and slightly negative in the eurozone and Japan.  They were expected to remain low indefinitely.  Remarkably, as recently as January 2022, investors thought that the probability the interest rate would rise above 4.0 % within 5 years was only 12% in the US, 4 % for the euro-zone, and 7 % for the UK [p.45].  Those were short-term nominal interest rates.  Correcting for expected inflation, real interest rates were substantially negative and expected to remain so. read more

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Isn’t this what a soft landing would look like?

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July 19, 2023 — A skydiver jumps out of an airplane, apparently without a working parachute. On the way down, a passing hang-glider calls out to ask how he is doing.  The plummeting man shouts back “Okay, so far!”

For many, the US economy resembles the skydiver.  But they are probably wrong.

  1. Expectations of a hard landing

Many think a hard landing became inevitable when the Fed in March 2022 began a series of interest rate hikes, which totals 5.0 percentage points so far and is expected to continue. Many economists, as well as the public, have been confidently predicting a recession for over a year now, or even saying that it has already begun.  In June 2022, 57% of respondents told pollsters that they believed the US was already in recession, versus only 21% who did not.  An inverted yield curve in bond markets suggests that the financial sector, too, has been expecting a downturn.  The word “recession” appeared far more often in public media during the last year than is usual even in the midst of a true recession. read more

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