Optimal Control & þe Optimistic Inflation Forecasts from þe Bond Market, &
Optimal Control & þe Optimistic Inflation Forecasts from þe Bond Market, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-05-12 Th
CONDITION: More Wonders of Invisible Crypto-World
Terra-Luna goes from $30 billion of market capitalization to $100 million. Terra-USD goes from $18 billion of market capitalization to $6 billion. But the only thing backing Terra-USD is your ability to turn it into Terra-Luna. And how can anyone’s assessment of the value of that backing not scale with the market capitalization of Terra-Luna.
Whimper. Whimper. Whimper.
FIRST: Optimal Control & the Optimistic Inflation Forecasts from the Bond Market
Optimal control. You have an objective: to get inflation back into its target range over the medium term—five to ten years from now—and to do so while doing the least damage to other objectives like employment and growth. If your best forecast is that your current policy path gets you there, you maintain your currency policy path. If your best forecast is that your current policy path does not get you there, you take the cheapest and most effective step to move the future needle. If the bond-market 5-year 5-year forward inflation breakeven is not the best forecast, what is the best forecast? Indeed, given that inflation is an expectational phenomenon in all our standard models—inflation will be what it is expected to be plus policy-change and economic-shock terms—it is very hard to see how the bond-market 5-year 5-year forward inflation breakeven could not be the best forecast. And if our standard models are not the best models, what are the best models?
Thus I look at this, and I think those who claim inflation is “out of control” are doing their audiences and their selves no good service…
Me over at Project Syndicate:
With commentators offering increasingly dismal warnings about the inflation situation in the United States, one might think that the US Federal Reserve has failed completely at its primary task. But the bond market is telling a different story, and there is no reason to think that it is driven by doves.
BERKELEY – As of Friday, May 6, the bond market expected US consumer price inflation to average 2.5% between five and ten years from now. That is the rate of inflation needed to equalize returns on inflation-indexed and non-indexed US Treasury securities. And given that CPI inflation has been running higher than the rate associated with the implicit price deflator for personal consumption expenditures, I count that 2.5% five-year, five-year-forward rate as hitting the US Federal Reserve’s 2% price-deflator inflation target.
What, then, would it take to get the economy back to the Fed’s targeted inflation rate? Since the five-year breakeven rate at the close of May 6 was 3.22%, the implicit expectation is that inflation will run a cumulative total of 3.6 percentage points above the Fed’s target over the next five years. If it does not cause the economy’s inflation anchor to vanish, a deviation of that size would be an exceedingly small price to pay for the rapid recovery from the pandemic-induced recession. If the recovery delivers the structural economic transformation that we need, the higher inflation that we have experienced will have been well worth it.
Accordingly, it seems to me that the Fed should be taking a victory lap. It has done precisely what it is supposed to do, by enabling America’s sticky-price, sticky-wage, sticky-debt economy to return rapidly not just to full employment but to the right version of full employment – the one that has workers working in sectors making products for which there is real, fundamental demand – after a shock. And it has done so without disrupting confidence in the monetary system and its stability.
So why does the very sharp Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University argue that “things are way out of control”? If you have been diverted from your desired trajectory, and you then find yourself on a path where you can expect to return to it, I would think the only way to describe the situation is as a case of being “in control.”
Rogoff makes clear that there is “a lot of uncertainty,” and that he is “not going to say I know exactly what needs to be done.” But his observation that inflation is “way out of control” makes sense only to the extent that he is willing to declare the bond market and its implicit expectations to be wrong. Only then could the expected evolution of Fed policy lead to inflation significantly higher than 3.22% over the next five years, and to average inflation significantly above 2.5% 5-10 years hence.
Sure, that could happen. The economy is a surprising place, and our models and forecasts are ultimately just poorly informed guesses. The Fed might have to change course substantially. It might have to send the US economy into a substantial recession with significantly higher-than-expected interest rates to return inflation to its target over the five- to ten-year medium run.
For Rogoff’s own implied forecast to come to pass, workers and bosses would have to reach wage bargains that assume inflation well above 3.2% for the next five years and well above 2.5% for the five years after that. Moreover, those inflationary wage bargains would have to be locked in place through contracts and institutional arrangements that would make it hard to revise them downward should they turn out to have exaggerated actual inflation. For workers and bosses to do that, they would have to be pretty confident that bond traders are irrationally Panglossian – that they are inflation doves despite the evidence to the contrary.
Is there any reason to think that bond traders are irrational Panglossian inflation doves? Are there any reasons to think that workers and bosses now believe that bond traders are irrational Panglossian inflation doves?
I see none.
In our modern economy, an outbreak of inflation is a peculiar expectations-driven process. It requires a vicious circle in which expectations of high inflation drive actions that then validate those expectations – with higher wages leading to higher consumer prices that in turn lead to demands for higher wages, ad infinitum. For this to happen, the expectation of high inflation has to come from somewhere, and as of now, it is not in evidence.
Yes, additional adverse supply shocks could lie in our future. The COVID-19 virus still has the potential to mutate and confront us with dangerous, disruptive new strains. Further disruptions could emanate from a widening of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine or from an economically catastrophic interaction of new virus variants and China’s zero-COVID policy. These kinds of developments could push inflation out of control.
But the fact that such risks exist does not mean we should live as if they have already come to pass, and thus ignore the world as it currently is.
One Video: Big-Data Economic History:
Melissa Dell: Automating the Large Scale Digitization of Historical Data: IDSS Distinguished Speaker Seminar <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnM7ePr6xqM>:
One Image: Deserts—Hot & Cold:
Very Briefly Noted:
Jake Blumgart: Tracking the Disastrous Collapse of U.S. Racial Integration: ‘Georgetown Law professor Sheryll Cashin’s latest book is an unsparing accounting of the collapse of racial integration after the Civil Rights era — and a plea for change… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-11/tracking-the-disastrous-collapse-of-u-s-racial-integration>
Cory Doctorow: Defi & Shadow Banking 2.0: Leverage, Rigidity & Bank Runs https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/02/shadow-banking-2-point-oh/#leveragePhilip Stafford: Move Along, Says Coinbase’s Armstrong: ‘Gensler is worried about the lack of strong walls between various lines of business…. “latforms trading ahead of their customers. In fact, they’re trading against their customers…”. It’s only partially accurate to call these businesses “exchanges”… <https://www.ft.com/content/e7b1ecc5-1070-47be-be2c-f1549624068c> Flint Dibble: In Defense of (Studying) Food. A Classical Zooarchaeologist’s Manifesto <https://eidolon.pub/in-defense-of-studying-food-41201d904c10>
Emily Chang: Google (GOOG) Devices Chief Says ‘Ambient Computing’ Is Future Goal: ‘According to Rick Osterloh, Google’s hardware chief. “Computers should be able to help you with whatever you need seamlessly, and be all around you,” Osterloh said in a Bloomberg Television interview on Wednesday… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-11/google-devices-chief-says-ambient-computing-is-future-goal?cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-markets>
Paul Campos: Cumulative Radicalization & the GOP: ‘Ian Kershaw’s concept of “working towards the Fuhrer”…. How in some ways [a] “weak”… leader of a fanatical political cult can still dominate all aspects of that cult’s development, despite his fundamental laziness, inattention to detail, contempt for bureaucratic regularity, tolerance for and even active encouragement of the most venal corruption… <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/05/cumulative-radicalization-and-the-gop>
Michael Batnick: Twenty Lessons Learned <https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2022/05/11/twenty-lessons-learned/>
Judith Delaney & Paul Devereux: Rank Effects in Education: <https://voxeu.org/article/rank-effects-education>
Twitter & ‘Stack:
Dan Jones: Outlaws #3: Reynard the Fox : ‘Part Brer Rabbit, part Jack Reacher, Reynard is one of the greatest and evilest characters in medieval popular literature…
Matt Blaze: ’Mostly as an exercise, I maintain a couple burner phones in a way that gives me moderately high confidence can’t be linked to me. It’s extremely difficult, expensive, fragile, and inconvenient. And requires using almost everything I know about communications systems and security…
Barry Ritholtz: _’The phrase “Collapsed Stablecoin” joins “Jumbo Shrimp” in the Oxymoron Hall of Fame. I wish George Carlin was still around to comment <https://t.co/UekwUTQ1L3>…
Manu Raju: ’50–49, Senate Democrats overcome filibuster for Lisa Cook to serve on the Federal Reserve Board. She is expected to be confirmed tonight and would be the first Black woman to be a member of the board…
Casey Newton: How Facebook Undercut the Oversight Board: ‘If the Oversight Board’s only role is to handle the easy questions, why bother with it at all?…
Addison del Mastro: Unplanned Vacancies: ‘The small-format supermarket chain Trader Joe’s… how efficient it is…
Director’s Cut PAID SUBSCRIBER ONLY Content Below:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.