Lies, Damned Lies and Inflation “Statistics”*
My daughter, who works for the Bank of England, is studying for her Master’s in Economics at the University of Edinburgh, and sent me one of her papers. It was filled with a vast array of complex mathematical equations of which I could make no sense, despite being a mathematician by training and studying Economics at Oxford…..a few years ago.
The Federal Reserve has teams of economists plus input from Reserve Banks all around the country. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the Consumer Price Index (CPI), has another battalion of experts. All this talent must, one could fairly assume, produce sophisticated and accurate models for inflation.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, to discover that one key element, housing inflation – which constitutes one-third of the CPI and 40% of “core” inflation (excluding food and energy) – is an imputed number (“assigned by inference”), not an actual one.
Read what Nobel prize-winning Economist Paul Krugman wrote recently: ”How does the bureau measure housing inflation? Not by looking at the prices at which houses are sold, which fluctuate a lot with things like interest rates. Instead, it looks at how much renters pay — and for the large number of Americans who own their own homes, it imputes what it calls Owners’ Equivalent Rent, an estimate based on rental markets of what homeowners would be paying if they were renters (or, if you like, the rent they are implicitly paying to themselves).
The trouble is that this measure relies on average rents, which to a large extent reflect leases signed many months ago. A new Fed study shows that official rent measures lag market rents by about a year. And here’s the thing: Market rental rates exploded in 2021, probably as a result of the rise in working from home, but have since leveled off and may in fact be falling.
So official inflation measures are telling us about what was happening a year ago; they overstate current inflation and, perhaps more important, grossly understate the extent to which the inflation picture has improved. If you try to measure inflation excluding those dubious housing numbers, plus other volatile elements, you get a picture of dramatic improvement, almost enough to declare the inflation surge over.”
Let’s look at inflation.There are more gauges of inflation than the UK had Prime Ministers in 2022, but let’s just look at Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE is the value of the goods and services purchased by, or on the behalf of, “persons” who reside in the United States.). (more…)
Has Inflation Peaked?
After I published Have Mortgage Rates peaked? last week a reader asked me why I thought the yield on the 10-year Treasury Bill would not continue to increase, so that even if the spread over the 30-year Fixed Rate Mortgage (FRM) narrowed, the FRM rate itself might still increase.
In Are we already in a Recession?, published on June 18, I wrote: “Just as the yield on 10T has more than doubled since pre-COVID while the Fed Funds rate is unchanged, so the Fed Funds rate can increase sharply – the Fed is forecasting it will reach 3.4% this year, also double its pre-COVID level – without necessarily impacting the yield on 10T. That will depend upon the economic outlook. Ironically, perhaps, the more determined the Fed is to drive down inflation – even at the cost of a recession and higher unemployment – the greater the chance that the yield on 10T – and by extension the FRM – will decline – at some point.”
In the last few days, as more economists talked about a recession after the Atlantic Fed updated its Q2 GDP estimate to minus 2.1% (it was 0% when I wrote on June 18), the yield on 10T has dropped sharply, falling to 2.9% from a peak of 3.5% in the middle of May: (more…)