inflation Archives - Bankers Anonymous

June 13, 2023June 13, 2023

How’s Inflation Going These Days?

How’s inflation going these days?

It was the talk of the town 6 months ago and 10 months ago. The most recently published April 2023 Consumer Price Index rise (the most commonly quoted inflation rate) was 4.9 percent annual, down from the peak 9.1 percent annual rate in June 2022.

Even as the world panicked last year about rising inflation, I will now share with you a teensy confession. I didn’t really see it. Or if I did see it, it felt fine, temporary, non-threatening. I know this is heretical and borderline obnoxious to say.

This week I came across a comment on inflation from the finance writer Morgan Housel, who is one of the very best at what he does.

“What I think is really interesting is that everyone spends their money differently. So no two people have the same inflation rate,” he said in an interview in September 2022. “There is no such thing as the inflation rate. It’s just your own individual household.”

Housel’s insight explains my reaction when compared to the collective freakout I noticed elsewhere. My experience of inflation is different from yours, and yours is different from everyone else’s.

Falling Prices

Now in the latter-half of my intended century on this planet, I could settle gently into the “kids, when I was your age, that used to cost a nickel” phase of my life. But as I look around, that story isn’t particularly true in many areas.

In July 2013 I purchased an Apple Macbook Pro laptop computer for the retail price of $2,499. This past week, the monitor died and I returned to the Apple store in the North Star mall and bought another Mac Pro laptop. In my mind, 10 years for a laptop is a good run. It lived a good long life as far as electronics go and it was time to buy a new one. I paid $1,999 retail for the new one with improved graphics, larger memory and a decade worth of incremental feature improvements compared to the 2013 version.

Last week I booked a round-trip flight to New York City in June for the all-in price of $517.80 (including taxes, travel booking, and airline fees). How much was this flight to New York City 33 years ago? I can’t compare the exact flight but The Department of Transportation reports that the average domestic airline fare from Texas in 1990 was $253.41. Meanwhile the average domestic round trip fare in Texas all-in was $314.75 in 2021.

Depending on the reference years, the average domestic flight costs the same, a little more, or a little less, over the past 40 years. This is actually incredible.

This past winter the internet lost its mind over the price of eggs, which had doubled. (Avian flu had wiped out the hens.) Our collective hive mind pointed to the rising cost of a carton of eggs as if that were some sign of inflation end-times. The price for a dozen large brown cage free eggs from HEB is $2.78 as I write this in mid-May 2023. Pretty much unchanged over the past decade.

I mention computers, flights, long-distance phone calls, and eggs because we notice the rise in prices but rarely their fall. So that’s one piece of the puzzle.

Inflation that we welcome

If you are a capitalist, inflation maybe hits differently. In my own capitalist way of thinking, the rise in both stock market values in my retirement portfolio over a decade and in the value of my home over that same decade are forms of inflation. Benign forms, from my perspective, but inflation nonetheless. Future purchasers of my shares or my home are negatively impacted by that inflation. Still, I’m personally glad for it.

Bloomberg News has run stories this year about companies that engage in “excuseflation.” That means firms that use bad news, like supply-chain disruptions or shortages or war – those were the top 2022 excuses – to raise prices. Companies that can raise prices and keep them high when normalcy returns – without losing market share – then have the opportunity for higher profits.

Investors, in turn, seek to purchase shares in companies that prove they can hike prices and expand margins. This is another way in which inflation hits differently depending on who you are. For owners of capital, price hikes by companies are a sign of strength and an incentive to invest. For homeowners, price hikes are a path to long-term wealth.

Inflation I don’t notice

I’m never going on a Caribbean cruise, where prices are up 14 percent since last year. I work from home, so I am not hurt much when gas prices hike the cost of a daily car commute. I don’t rent my home, so I’ve avoided one of the most brutal rises in costs in recent years.

Now, you’ve probably noticed I have conflated three ideas. First, prices are flat or falling in many areas over the past 30 years. (televisions, computers, long distance telephone calls, plain t-shirts and socks). Second, I benefit from some price hikes (my real estate, stocks in companies that have pricing power to use inflation as an excuse to hike prices and increase their margins.) Third, some price changes I don’t stress about because they hardly affect me directly (gasoline and diesel fuel, cost of caribbean cruises, home rental prices.)

I’m not saying inflation isn’t real. I’m saying our experience of inflation is unique to each of us. There is no objective inflation since we all buy and own different stuff.

My inflation experience is about to get worse

One of the worst areas of inflation over the past 30 years has been the rising cost of higher education. Since I will be paying for this over 8 of the next 9 years for my daughters, you can expect near-constant whining in this space about tuition inflation. It’s going to be brutal. For me to experience and for you to read about.

A version of this ran in the San Antonio Express News and Houston Chronicle.

Please see related posts:

Book Review: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

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January 6, 2022January 6, 2022

The I Bond Solution

I learned about a timely investment tool from an article by Burton Malkiel in the Wall Street Journal this past month.

Timely, because observed, economy-wide inflation has finally hit us and prompted the Federal Reserve to acknowledge that “transitory” isn’t the right word for inflation anymore.

I don’t give investment advice here, nor should you ever take investment advice from a stranger who writes a blog or newspaper column. So this is not something you necessarily should do. Rather, I think it’s worth knowing about tools that may solve a particular worry of yours, particularly if it’s been nearly 40 years since we’ve actually experienced broad-based inflation.

Malkiel is best known as the author of one of my personal All Time Top Five Investing Books, A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

So for me – just like in those E.F. Hutton commercials that the over-50 crowd will remember – “when Burton Malkiel speaks, people listen.”

In his article, Malkiel introduced the US Treasury I bond as a tool that we should consider as part of their overall portfolio.

Here’s the part that makes I bonds quite sexy right now. Because the consumer price index jumped so much this Fall, the yield on I bonds is 7.12 percent. I bonds purchased in January 2022 will enjoy this fixed rate until July 1st. That is the highest interest rate that I bonds have offered since May 2000. The semi-annual yield reset will track the consumer price index in the future. After the next reset, the yield could very well go down, if inflation goes down. If it stays high, the I bond will keep a very nice yield, which is why it’s a plausible hedge against inflation. No matter what the inflation rate is in the future, the yield on I bonds can not go negative.

Institutional investors – big funds and insurance companies and banks – typically have looked to TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities) when they worry about inflation. Since 1997, investors have been able to buy these bonds that pay a fixed interest but that adjust their principal upward in response to inflation, also as measured by the consumer price index.

The little guy has typically only been able to access TIPS through mutual funds. Because inflation has been so tame since 1997, TIPS have rarely been high yielding, but instead have offered a hedge against the “what if” scenario. And that “what if” has hardly shown up until recently. Returns over the past 10 years on a TIPS fund have been in the 3 percent annual range, before taxes, with the biggest boost to that performance hitting in the past two years.

Unlike TIPS, you would buy I bonds directly online from the US Treasury, without a brokerage company or mutual fund. They’re not saleable by a brokerage, nor by you. You buy them in increments from $25 up to $10,000 maximum per social social number, per year. They register in your name only, or the name of the trust or partnership buying it.

I bonds are designed for retail investors with a long time horizon, and do not work as well for a short-term trade. That’s because you will pay a 3-month interest penalty if you redeem after 1 year. Although they can’t be traded and are intended to be held for 30 years, you can redeem your I bond after 5 years without penalty.

ibond_details — A detailed comparison of TIPS and IBonds from the Treasury website

Because interest accrues until maturity or redemption, you will pay income tax on the interest only at the end. The following fact is irrelevant for Texans, but the interest earned on I bonds is exempt from local and state income taxes, like traditional municipal bonds.

Speaking of traditional bonds, US Treasury or corporate bonds are the last thing you want to buy in an inflationary environment. In addition, US Treasury bonds offer a measly 0.5 percent to 1.8 percent right now. Even a basket of high-risk corporate bonds (what we’ve impolitely called junk bonds since the 1980s) only get you about a 4.5 percent annual yield. That’s unacceptable unless you enjoy locking in losses against the current observed rate of inflation.

Maybe another concluding thought about this particular investment tool is in order. I, personally, will not be purchasing inflation bonds, neither TIPS nor US Treasury I bonds. I’m not actually that worried about inflation in my life or in the economy. I think my combination of real estate (my home!) and stocks (my retirement accounts!) will serve me fine under medium-level inflation. But I have a different risk appetite from most – my appetite is quite high. And I have a longish time horizon. I’m turning 50 this year so I have another 80 or so years to live (if my math is correct?)

I’m not deviating from my plan (Buy 100% equity index funds, never sell) but I mention this I bond product so that you’re a more-informed investor.

Also, you should read Burton Malkiel’s classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street. That is my strongest investment recommendation. I wouldn’t recommend any particular stock or bond to buy, but reading a classic like Malkiel’s book is highly likely to make you richer in the long run.

A version of this post ran in the San Antonio Express News and Houston Chronicle

Please see related posts:

Book Review: A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel

Never Sell – A Disney and Churchill Mashup

How To Invest

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December 31, 2021December 31, 2021

Revisiting Recycling in late 2021

The two biggest macroeconomic worries in the US right now are burgeoning inflation and supply chain issues. A plausible narrative for both is that the rolling global COVID pandemic has disrupted our ability to efficiently move products to markets, while loose money policies have ignited inflation.

These both sound bad. But with markets, sometimes good or bad results depend on who you are. A disrupted supply chain for one business is an opportunity for another business. And high prices? Well, in recycling commodity markets for example, it’s the best market they’ve seen in the last ten years.

Colored trash bins used to recycle paper, plastic and glass.

What does this mean? Recycled materials – in the big four categories of paper, metal, glass and plastic – all have secondary markets. The business goal of a recycling provider is to sort, package, and sell as cleanly as possible these four types of materials to the end user.

“Cardboard and paper prices are both on the rise. Plastic prices have skyrocketed compared to what they were, let’s say, five years ago,” Josephine Valencia, Deputy Director at the City of San Antonio Solid Waste Department, tells me. Her explanation points to the same macro trends we’re all worried about.

Valencia continues explaining high prices of recycled commodities, “In the past two years, and this is just my guess, it’s COVID-related supply shortages. There’s a shortage of just about everything these days. And I think that has really driven up the price of certain [recycled] commodities.”

So if you’re in the recycling business, these are the best of times.

If your personal subscription to the online newsletter “Resource Recycling” has recently lapsed, allow me to quote a few price changes for you.

Baled steel cans have risen from $78 per ton last year to $250 per ton.

Baled aluminum cans jumped from $0.45 a pound last year to $0.77 a pound last year.

On the paper side, corrugated containers trade for $171 per ton, up from $60 per ton last year. Another paper product, sorted residential paper, sells for $117 per ton compared to $38 per ton a year ago.

As the band Chic used to sing back in 1979, These. Are. The. Good. Times.

If you were hoping to have a disco-era earworm stuck in your head for the rest of the day, dating back to the last time we saw high inflation, you’re welcome.

When last I checked in with the recycling markets in 2019, a few trends were made clear to me.

First, glass is infinitely recyclable but generally a money loser for recyclers unless it can be sorted by color and delivered to a nearby glass recycling operation. Second, paper and cardboard was in a multi-year decline because of the lack of demand for newsprint (RIP the newspaper industry!) and the awkward adjustment to a world in which ubiquitous Amazon cardboard didn’t fit traditional cardboard-sorting machines. Third, plastic prices were in freefall because China had begun refusing most deliveries. Fourth, metal was the only reliable money-maker.

But high prices in 2021 have swung recycling programs from losses two years ago back to a money maker. Things are a lot better now in San Antonio, for example, says Valencia.

I’m going to simplify the math a bit, but here’s the basic deal in my city. We pay approximately $50 a ton to dump recycled bins with the city’s provider, which currently is the large waste processor Republic Services. Republic sorts and processes the stuff, and then sells it in the secondary commodities market, and agrees to share half the resulting revenue with the city. If the revenue from sales generates $120 per ton, the city makes $60, and can count a “profit” of $10 per ton. That’s approximately the economics – admittedly simplified – right now.

In a bad year like 2019, the revenue share didn’t quite cover the upfront $50 cost to deliver, so the city had a “loss.” A bunch of other factors makes my explanation overly simple – they average out prices, contaminated commodities change the final revenue-sharing formula, losses can be carried forward – but Valencia endorsed my explanation as basically approximately true.

A factor which tempers the celebration of 2021 recycling profit is that – just like any business – the city’s costs are also affected by inflation. In the past year, the cost of purchasing new plastic household bins has increased from roughly $50 a barrel to $75 a barrel. Because they are made of plastic and plastic prices are way up. With a million barrels in circulation right now, that price increase affects the annual budget in a real way. And just as the price of new and used cars has increased, so too has the price of garbage trucks. In that past year, that’s gone up from $365 thousand per truck to $425 thousand per truck, says Valencia. Because of course trucks are made up of steel and plastic, all of which costs more now than last year.

“On the one side I can say, I’m excited as the city recycling revenues have gone up, so we’re making money. But on the other side, at the end of the day, we’re not sitting on a windfall because even though our revenues went up all our expenses went up as well,” continued Valencia.

Like any volatile financial market, hindsight is 20/20 and past performance is no guarantee of future results, included for recycled commodities. We don’t know what happens next.

By the way, the multi-generational fix that recycling experts would ideally have us do remains the same: Wean us off the big blue unsorted barrel of mixed commodity waste. We should all be sorting the multiple waste streams in our households into many different smaller homogenous-material barrels. Civilized countries (and by “civilized” I explicitly exclude here both the United States and the Republic of Texas) have figured out how to do this basic sorting at home. Everyone would recycle more stuff and make more money.

A version of this post ran in the San Antonio Express News and Houston Chronicle.

Please see related posts

Recycling Markets were broken in 2019 – Part I

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February 15, 2021February 15, 2021

Ask an Ex-Banker: How To Fight Upcoming Inflation?

A reader wrote me recently:

“Given the staggering debt of the United States and Congress’ seemingly laissez-faire attitude and impotence towards addressing it, I am starting to be concerned about the value of U.S. currency. Historically, wars and corrupt governments have led to hyperinflation in other countries where the costs of goods and services skyrocket. The likelihood of this happening in the U.S. may seem remote but it is not impossible. Are there ways for individuals to protect themselves from this?” — Dom D. From San Antonio

I really like this question. Dom recognizes our unprecedented current debt situation and the unfortunate parallels with other countries where hyperinflation followed. I have no idea what’s going to happen.

If it’s comforting, hyperinflation would require a failure by the Federal Reserve to do its job. The Fed withstood the last few years better than most institutions. But, yeah, increased inflation seems increasingly likely for the reasons Dom named. So what to do?

federal_reserve_seal — The Fed has to fail for hyperinflation to happen

Something to remember about inflation is that if the underlying economy is unchanged but the amount of available currency doubles, it is reasonable to assume that the price of things approximately doubles. This is bad when we have to pay for things. It is not necessarily bad if the price doubles of things that we already own. Things that you could own, which should double in price if the supply of money doubles, include real estate and stocks. As a result, these make for very good inflation hedges.

So the first great way to hedge against inflation is to own a business, or preferably many businesses. Some insist on the hard way to do this.¹ I would like to focus everyone’s attention on the lazy way – my preferred way – which is to own hundreds or even thousands of businesses through a single low-cost diversified stock mutual fund. In an inflationary environment, successful businesses raise prices in response to their higher costs. Successful businesses adjust dynamically to earn profits despite inflation.

Similarly it is reasonable to expect – all else being equal – that a stock worth $100 today will be worth $200 tomorrow, if the amount of currency doubles overnight. One explanation for the record rise of the stock market in the last few months – the one I find most plausible – is that the Fed has dramatically increased the supply of currency in the economy. The record stock market rise is probably a specific form of inflation hitting one very visible corner of the overall economy.

The second great hedge against inflation is to own real estate in advance of inflation. For starters, try to own your home. And then live in it for a long time. The price of your home should appreciate roughly at the rate of inflation. That’s the definition of a good hedge. Let’s say, for example, you own a home today worth $250,000. And then we suffer a patch of 10% annual inflation for ten years. Your house at the end of 10 years will be worth a little over 648 thousand dollars. Compound interest math uses the same formula as inflation math.

Now, here’s an even more interesting twist on inflation hedging via home ownership. The triple lindy inflation hedge, if you will. Are you ready for it?

Do you have a long-term fixed-rate (let’s say, 30-year) mortgage on your house?

Ta da! You did it. You are amazing. Have you ever thought about being a hedge fund manager?

Here’s why this is an amazing inflation-hedging tool. Using the previous example, as your home value leaps upward over 10 years of 10% annual inflation from $250K to $648K, your 30-year fixed rate mortgage decreases dramatically, both in nominal and real terms. Using a standard 30 year amortization schedule, your mortgage would pay down from $200K to $162K during the first ten years. At the end of ten years, a $162K amount of debt on a house worth $648K is actually pretty easy to handle. You moved from owning $50K in home equity to $486K in home equity, nearly a ten-times increase.

Also, just as money isn’t worth as much following inflation, debts are also not worth as much in an inflationary future, so $162K in debt is not as big a deal in that future as it would be today. In other words, being a borrower during an inflationary period is actually a powerful inflation hedge. (Provided, of course, your debt has a fixed rather than variable interest rate.)

By owning your home with a mortgage, you’re a fancy inflation hedger, and you didn’t even know it.

Next, what should you specifically not do if you anticipate future bouts of inflation?

Do not buy fixed income products for any investment purposes. Traditional fixed income investment products include bonds, bond funds, annuities, and CDs. Inflation absolutely wrecks the value of these fixed income investments. Even money market funds, savings accounts, and cash could be considered fixed income, just with an extremely short (same day) maturity date. If your net worth or income is in any of these fixed income products, inflation will unfortunately destroy your wealth.

Next, do not buy gold as an inflation hedge. Gold is a pretty but useless metal sold by preying on the fears of unsophisticated financial minds. I understand you don’t believe me, because of all those plausible sales pitches on your video screens, but it’s true.

Also, do not buy bitcoin as an inflation hedge. Bitcoin is a fake currency, neither useful for buying beer nor paying taxes. It has no legal use case and produces no wealth, except for people hyping you to buy it, based on the greater fool theory of speculation.

In sum, own your own home, own some businesses either directly or through the stock market, and if you must borrow, then borrow at a fixed interest rate. Avoid the standard inflation-hedge scams.

What I really like about the previous two sentences is that in anticipation of heavy inflation – and I can not emphasize this strongly enough – you should pursue the exact same investment actions I would advise to anyone who is not anticipating a future bout of heavy inflation.

Did you catch that? It’s important. Do exactly the same prudent things you should always do.

Finally, is Dom’s scenario likely to come to pass? I don’t know. Neither does anyone. Pundits who predict the economic future with certainty are fools or confidence men to be deeply distrusted.

I have personally (but silently) expected significant inflation since aggressive interest rate drops in September 2001. I’ve been wrong every time.

Although, maybe not. Come to think of it, my home value and my stock index funds have suffered quite a bit of inflation over the past twenty years. Haven’t yours?

A version of this ran in the San Antonio Express News.

Please see related posts:

Homeownership is great, including as an inflation hedge

Bitcoin and Bullocks

Never Buy Gold

ETFs and Mutual Funds

Trump_federal_reserve — This guy…would have happily caused hyper inflation if he thought it served his short-term political or narcissistic interests

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Being an entrepreneur is the hard way. I’ve tried it. It’s…hard. ↩

November 17, 2018

Federal Reserve Independence

When it comes to Federal Reserve policy, we need to focus our worries about the correct thing. Hint: It’s not inflation. Also, it’s not recession. Also, It’s not the rate of interest rate hikes.

It’s the Fed’s independence. Even President Trump agrees with me. Although admittedly, for reasons diametrically opposed to my reasons.

In recent weeks, President Trump has ramped up his attacks on the Federal Reserve. Trump told Fox News that “my biggest threat is the Fed.” Also, that the Fed is “loco,” and he’s unhappy “because the Fed is raising rates too fast, and it’s too independent.”

After three interest rate hikes earlier in 2018, the Federal Reserve will raise short-term interest rates one more time this year. The Fed will likely rise another 1 percent over the next two years, according to their future guidance, and barring unexpected developments like war or recession.

The fact that Trump is unhappy is not particularly surprising. In fact, White House grumbling about the Federal Reserve is a common enough theme over the last eighty years. Not using Trump’s uniquely colorful language, mind you, but it’s still not wholly new.

History of Presidential Jawboning

Political leaders in power always want pro-growth policies. Low unemployment and high asset prices tend to make leaders look good. Presidents generally don’t want the Federal Reserve to – in Fed Chairman’s William McChesney Martin’s famous phrase “take away the punch bowl just as the party is getting started.” President Nixon reportedly blamed his 1960 loss to Kennedy as a result of Fed Chairman Martin’s tight monetary policy of high interest rates.

President Johnson complained as well, saying “Martin, my boys are dying in Vietnam, and you won’t print the money I need.”

President Nixon reportedly both put pressure on Martin’s successor at the Federal Reserve Arthur Burns to keep interest rates low and money flowing during his 1972 re-election, which he handily won. Paul Volcker, Fed Chairman during the 1980s, published a book in late October 2018 in which he claims President Reagan’s Chief of Staff James Baker told him in 1984: “The president is ordering you not to raise interest rates before the election.” Volcker adds to the story that the Federal Reserve at the time had no plan to raise interest rates.

George HW Bush was upset in the fall of 1992 that the Fed was raising interest rates, before he went on to lose his re-election to Bill Clinton.

President Clinton’s budget chief Leon Panetta and later Chief of Staff twice tried to preempt the Federal Reserve, saying at his 1993 confirmation hearing “we ought to have cooperation from the Federal Reserve,” meaning lower interest rates, and then in a 1995 interview “it would be nice to get whatever kind of cooperation we can get to get this economy going,” referring again to Federal Reserve policy. Despite the instincts of leaders in power, Federal Reserve observers think we have made a lot of progress since the bullying of President’s Johnson and Nixon.

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama avoided appearing to try to influence interest rate policy. Inevitably, political leaders oppose higher interest rates because they reduce business borrowing, risk increasing unemployment, and knock down asset prices of real estate and stock markets. Political leaders want lower interest rates – it’s stimulative to the economy, and therefore helpful for their political prospects.

Volcker’s legacy

Since Paul Volcker famously raised interest rates early enough in the Reagan presidency to tame inflation in the early 1980s, the Fed has built a rock-solid reputation as independent from political influence. It is believed to manage the money supply without favor or political influence, giving investors worldwide confidence in the dollar.

The key question then is whether Trump’s attacks on the Federal Reserve will have an effect. We need to hope they do not. Just as the greatest risk to Trump’s presidency is not the independence of the Fed, neither is the greatest risk to the US economy inflation or the rise in unemployment, the two typical concerns of the Federal Reserve.

Rather, the greatest risk to the US economy is that people the world over would come to believe that the US Federal Reserve is not acting independently of political pressure. A primary reason the dollar still remains the global reserve currency of choice is that global allocators of capital believe the Federal Reserve is not captive to the US political system.

In a clever take that emphasizes a silver lining in the storm clouds, the Wall Street Journal’s Spencer Jakab recently argued that Trump’s recent Fed bashing is actually a good thing, since it proves that the Fed is willing to do an unpopular thing for the right reasons. Since it continues to defy Trump’s wishes, we should be happy that the Federal Reserve is under attack. I mean, I guess? Like a Category Five hurricane slamming against the retaining wall protecting the coastal city is a good thing, because it didn’t break the wall this time, and that shows us how strong the retaining wall is right now. So, yay, hurricanes? I’m sorry, that logic is bass-ackwards.

The real risk

We can survive a recession. We would have a harder time surviving the loss of confidence that would follow if Trump could jawbone the Fed into keeping rates low, for political purposes.

We can survive a little inflation. A little inflation does not make us much closer to Venezuela. Rather, a political leader who can get what he or she wants with monetary policy does make us a lot more like Venezuela.

Please see related posts:

The Federal Reserve and Inflation

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November 9, 2018November 9, 2018

Federal Reserve and Inflation

The Federal Reserve has raised short term interest rates three times already this year by one-quarter percent, and it seems poised to do so again in December, even though it left rates unchanged this week. Over the next two years, barring an unanticipated war or recession, the Federal Reserve will raise short-term rates by another percentage point.

We may have different reasons for benefiting from higher or lower interest rates, depending on whether we are primarily borrowers or savers, employers or employees, exporters or importers, young or old.

The effects of rate hikes on the economy are complex and incredibly important. But we probably think of interest rates and the Federal Reserve a bit like changes to the earth’s climate – massive forces shifting ominously, seemingly far beyond our individual control. We vaguely understand them to have huge implications. We’d like to know more, but how?

There are two big questions to understand today about the Federal Reserve and rising interest rates.

First, what is the relationship between inflation and interest rate hikes?

Second, what is the proper relationship between political leaders and the Federal Reserve?

I’ll talk about the inflation question here and leave the political question of the Federal Reserve for a later post.

From a multi-decade perspective, we’re moving from artificially low interest-rates – dating back to a period that started with the 9/11 attacks and were renewed by the 2008 financial crisis – to a more “normal range” interest rate environment.

In normal times, the Federal Reserve raises rates when it worries about inflation, and it lowers rates when it worries most about unemployment. The Fed’s not worried about unemployment – currently at a 49-year low. Instead, the Fed seeks to keep inflation in check. But because inflation apparently isn’t rampant, the Fed can take it’s time with gradual rate hikes.

One of the great economic mysteries of the last decade is the absence, or at least inconsistency, of observable inflation, despite the fact that the Federal Reserve pulled out all the stops to make lots of money available in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. Pretty much every observer, even supporters of the post-2008 crisis policy of easy-money-plus-low-interest-rates, predicted a significant uptick in inflation. That, seemingly, was the price we had to pay to kickstart the economy.

But then, it didn’t happen. Or it didn’t happen in the way we expected. From the beginning of 2010 through September 2018, the Consumer Price Index – a traditional measure of inflation – rose only 16.4 percent. Annual inflation averaged less than 1.7 percent in that period, which is totally non-threatening. Consumer inflation from 2010 to today is like the dog that didn’t bark in the night.

We can be a bit more sophisticated though in understanding different types inflation and what it means for different people in an economy.

Inflation types

We should be aware of least three different types of inflation.

There’s the traditional type of consumer price inflation we see, which shows up in the price of gasoline, the stuff we buy at WalMart, health care, tuition, and the cost of a pizza on a Friday night. I know you think you’re paying too much lately for this stuff, but compared to other decades consumer inflation has been pretty modest.

At least two other types of inflation matter as well, however, asset price inflation and wage inflation.

Asset price inflation shows up as the increase in the price of real estate and the stock market. We generally cheer this type of inflation as a healthy sign of economic growth, although it’s not a purely good thing, depending on who you are.

To pick one real estate measure for example, the St. Louis Federal Reserve House Price Index for Texas has risen by 49.8 percent since the beginning of 2010. In other words, even though consumer goods cost just 16 percent more, houses in Texas cost 50 percent more than they did in 2010. What about stocks? To pick another measure, the Russell 2000 Index of small capitalization stocks is up 150% since the beginning of 2010. The rise in stocks isn’t entirely inflation, as its partly due to retained profits and buybacks, but inflation is part of that 150% rise in stocks.

So, is asset inflation good or bad? It depends.

Where you stand depends on where you sit

If you’re a twenty-something or thirty-something trying to save for your first home purchase, and home prices rise by 5-10 percent each year over a decade, this type of inflation actually hurts your plans. Similarly, for a young person trying to accumulate a retirement account nest egg through stock investing, a rising stock market is actually quite a bad thing. A twenty or thirty-something saver and investor should fear asset price inflation because it makes their wealth-building plan much harder to enact.

Interest rates hikes have traditionally had a dampening effect on asset price inflation.

Finally, there’s wage inflation. If you’re a worker earning a salary, you of course want high inflation of your wages and benefits. Measuring the change in the Employment Cost Index for civilian workers since 2010 until the latest 2018 numbers, we can calculate an average of 19.2 percent inflation in total compensation.

An employer, obviously, will experience wage inflation as a big problem, one that directly cuts into the cost of doing business and profits. A worker, by contrast, directly benefits from wage inflation.

I mention all these different types of inflation because interest rate hikes tend to dampen all three types – consumer, asset price, and wage inflation. Depending on who you are, higher interest rates will affect you in different ways, even though we typically only think of consumer inflation. Are you a worker or an employer? Are you an importer or an exporter? Are you young or old? Are you a borrower or a saver?

With observable consumer inflation so low, does it even make sense for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates? President Donald Trump doesn’t think so. He has argued in recent weeks that the Fed is “loco,” and that “my biggest threat is the Fed,” and because “you don’t see that inflation coming back” that he disagrees with the Federal Reserve’s moves to hike interest rates.

Let’s talk about that in a later post.

Please see related post:

Federal Reserve and an Independent Central Bank

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Tag: inflation

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