Yesterday, the release of key economic indicators in China produced headlines like this: China Targets Inflation as Economy Runs Hot. The table below lists the full release, including the consensus expectations (Bloomberg’s survey) for each statistic. (Here is the link for the actual data release.) As you can see, the survey undershot the actual results […]
Alan Greenspan: The U.S. Federal Reserve has done all it can do to reduce unemployment and needs to worry more about the risk of inflation from the stimulus it poured into the economy, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Sunday. But didn’t we just Get All That Money Back? [link added] Greenspan’s reason unemployment […]
Following up on this post, a 4-week auction over year-end (PDF) that sold at 0.00% interest, with a coverage ratio of 4.4:1. (Yield unchanged from the previous week, and the week before that.) Who could see Looming Inflation in this? See next post.
Today’s release by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas of October’s Trimmed Mean Personal Consumption Expenditure gives us a chance to check this “alternative measure of core inflation.” The clearest thing is that it does what the FRB Dallas intends: generally reduces the measure of inflation: For the graphic above, any value above the line […]
Ken Houghton follows up on his previous post. One of the few honest statements that came out of the Reagan Administration was in late 1982, when the Volcker policies were working but the market was still spooked. “People expect that inflation will be higher than it will be.” The above compares the University of Michigan’s […]
Ken Houghton notes that playing with data is dangerous. Predicting the future tends to be easy. There are several ways to do it. First, you can predict that everything will grow as it did this year—or last year, or the mean of the past x years. Or you can predict that it will be great […]
I try to like the NYTimes Economics Reporting. I really do. Heck, any place that publishes Uwe Reinhardt can’t be all bad. But David Leonhardt, as he does often enough that I hesitate to read his work, again goes beyond the pale today, and clearly does so deliberately. The offending paragraph: Twenty-two months after the […]
by Rebecca There is no shortage of speeches by US central bankers these days. The following is an excerpt from a NY Times article that highlights the debate among key Fed officials about the speed and method of stimulus withdrawal once the decision to exit has been made: Mr. Bernanke and other officials want to […]
As a rule, the Shiller Index uses the CPI as reported for All Urban Consumers (CPIAUCNS on Fred(r)). But the Index is only updated Quarterly, so monthly data is estimated. Which produces a very interesting difference over August, not to mention September expectations: The annualised inflation rate between June and August is 0.39%, which just […]
Rebecca Wilder With the developed and developing economies printing money like it’s going out of style, the exit strategy – i.e., taking back the hundred percent increase in the monetary base (at least in the US) – is rumored to be the topic du jour at the G-20 summit later this month. According to Reuters, […]