"I still hold out some hope": James Bullard on the U.S. becoming Japan

Refreshingly outspoken James Bullard, from the St. Louis Fed, gives an interview to the New York Times. Some great quotes (emphasis mine):

"The general rule of thumb within the Fed is that labor market data trumps G.D.P. data." 

"Once major central banks hit the zero lower bound, the key issue was whether central banks would be able to keep inflation expectations consistent with inflation targets." 

"I think the Brexit vote, there are a couple of aspects of this that make it much less of an international macroeconomic event. It’s a scheduled event; you can track which way the vote is going to go by looking at polling; and it’s a long-term strategic vote on the part of the U.K. The day after Brexit — even if they vote to leave — nothing would actually change in terms of the trade arrangements. Those would continue for at least two years." 

"The norm in central banking, away from the zero bound, is to say, “We have set the policy rate exactly where we think it should be for today, given everything that’s going on in the economy, and in the future we’ll look at the data.” You didn’t do this kind of dot-plot thing. [...] I’ve wondered if we should get back to something that’s more akin to that. We don’t want to give unintentional commitments." 

"I’ve actually argued that unconventional policy works reasonably well. But it’s far less clear how it works, or how effective it is." 

"I’ve always been worried that the long run here is the Japanese outcome. I still hold out hope that that’s not the case, but I am worried about it, and it’s been going on for a very long time. If you talk to people in Tokyo, they say, 'Well, we’ve been through this and tried all these things, and you guys are just following us.' I hope that’s not exactly true. [...] I still hold out some hope." 

"I’m not as big an advocate of fiscal policy as some other people. It’s very hard to do very much on a business cycle time scale, given the fact that you’ve got to work with Congress." 

"At some point something will happen and we’ll be back in recession, and by almost any reckoning we will not have much that we can do in the way of lowering our policy rate."

Core inflation around the world

I put together a chart of the 12-month percent change of measures of core inflation for a selection of countries. The definition of core inflation varies across countries.

Green (red) means lower (higher) inflation. The color scale is meaningful within rows only. So, for example, the deep-green that the U.K. shows for June 2015 means that the core inflation in that month is among the lowest observed in the U.K. between June 2012 and June 2015 (but not necessarily low across countries; in fact, Switzerland's is lower).

The two lines at the bottom, below the legend, show the median core inflation rate and a measure of cross-country dispersion (the median absolute deviation).

     Click on the picture to enlarge

Inflation round-up

The Reserve Bank of India is officially an inflation targeter. The agreement between the Ministry of Finance and the RBI was signed on February 20, and published a few days ago. The target is to "bring inflation below 6 per cent" by January 2016. For financial year 2016-17 and subsequent years the target will be 4±2%, so the acceptable inflation band will be 2%-6%. That would represent a significant reduction from the typical inflation rates in India since 2008.

RBI governor Raghuram Rajan has de facto followed an inflation target since the start of 2014, but the monetary policy framework was not official. Prior to inflation targeting, the RBI's policy target can be described as flexible, as it included, besides inflation, the rupee exchange rate and banking sector stability.

Amol Agrawal, at Mostly Economics, doesn't like the agreement.

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Eurozone inflation expectations are sinking, say researchers at the New York Fed. Survey-based inflation expectations have been falling at the one, two, and five-year horizons. They're particularly worried that the whole distribution of inflation expectations is shifting down, not just the median, or the lower percentiles.

A report by Generali, however, shows that inflation expectations measured by inflation swaps have picked up during 2015.

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Inflation, relatively: The following map shows inflation relative to each country's own history (the 10-year z-score), as of 2014-Q4. Despite abundant talk of Russian inflation, prices are increasing slightly more than they have, on average, over the past ten years, adjusted for standard deviation (z score of 0.13).

The highest inflation rates, relative to their own medium-term experiences, are for Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Japan, and Gabon. The lowest inflation rates, relative to their own experiences, are in Greece, United Kingdom, Hungary, and Poland, in that order.

The eurozone is pretty green (meaning low inflation), but if you squint you'll notice that Sweden and Switzerland are experiencing relatively less deflation than their European neighbors. Even the U.S. is deviating more from its own history than Switzerland.

One-year inflation rate, 2014-Q4, 10-year z-score, relative to own country's history. Source: FactSet data, gunnmap.herokuapp.com, author's elaboration.

Inflation in the eurozone: goods versus services

Giulio Zanella (hat tip to John Cochrane) writes a post suggesting that Italy’s deflation is mostly imported. He supports his idea with two observations. First, the price index of goods has declined, but the price index of services has increased (coincidentally, by the same percentage). Second, among goods, those whose price has declined are: unprocessed food, energy, tobacco, and consumer durables. The first three have in common, Zanella says, that they’re traded in global commodity markets.

Assume that goods are tradable in international markets, whereas services are non-tradable—a good approximation for a country like Italy, Zanella says. Then, he concludes, the origin of Italy’s deflation is international and on the supply side, whereas the contribution of weak domestic demand is “modest.”

In this post I look at the questions of whether eurozone deflation is really “imported,” and of how big the deflation threat is.

For the currency area as a whole, disinflation is a lot faster for energy and unprocessed food than for the other components of the HICP:

Within the “core” inflation rate, durable and semi-durable non-energy goods are in outright deflation, whereas non-durable goods are not:

The identification of the tradable component of the HICP with goods, and the non-tradable component with services is not accurate, but I’ll accept it for the sake of simplicity. (After all, the main drivers of services inflation should be domestic factors.) Extending this simplification to prices, goods deflation is “imported,” whereas services deflation is “homegrown.”

The distinction is important, among other things, because the optimal monetary policy response depends on the type of deflation. If deflation is imported, the ECB should do nothing, because commodity prices and the exchange rate are outside the set of things it can (or wants to) control. Let’s look, then, at the split of the HICP between goods and services.

The sub-index for all goods was falling at an annual rate of 0.3% as of July, whereas the price index of the basket of services was increasing 1.2%:

(Goods account for about 57.2% of the eurozone-wide HICP, and services for 42.8%.) 

Services inflation appeared to be declining from 2011 up until April 2013, and since then it’s been more or less flat around 1.2% (to zoom in, adjust the dates on the chart above).

It appears, then, that a large part of the eurozone’s current disinflation might be “imported.” Another, smaller part of this disinflation is “homegrown,” but it doesn’t seem to be getting worse.

What’s the evidence across countries?

Goods inflation has declined in every single of the 15 countries I consider*. In all but two countries, prices are falling outright.

Services inflation has declined overall, but slightly (from 1.4% in July 2013 to 1.2% one year later). In five countries services inflation rose: Belgium, Ireland, France, Portugal, and Finland. In one country, Greece, deflation became less pronounced. In two countries, Germany and Austria, the services inflation rate didn’t change. And in the remaining six countries inflation declined: Estonia, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

So far, then, I’d say the jury is still out on whether disinflation, for services, is continuing.

Clemente De Lucia, economist at BNP Paribas, just published a research note taking a deep look at services inflation. This is what I see, from the first section of his note (“Inflation decomposition”):

1. Services inflation in core countries (Netherlands, Austria, Luxembourg, Belgium, Finland, Germany, France) is higher than in periphery countries (Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy). In the “core” region, services inflation shows no apparent trend since early 2011, whereas in the “periphery” services inflation has been roughly flat since late 2013:

Source: Clemente De Lucia (BNP Paribas), July-August 2014.

De Lucia mentions how, in the core, the current inflation rate is “slightly below its historical average,” and that in Germany and the Netherlands the services inflation rate is below the eurozone aggregate (although barely so):

Source: Clemente De Lucia (BNP Paribas), July-August 2014.

2. "Lowflation” is spreading across services sub-categories, but deflation is less pervasive. To gauge the diffusion of disinflation and deflation, De Lucia looks at the percentage of the 39 sub-components of the services HICP that had an inflation rate between 1% and 2%, between 0% and 1%, and below 0%.

For the eurozone as a whole, the share of services sub-categories with inflation between 1% and 2% has shot up, but the share of services in deflation has declined (from a percentage that was never higher than 20%):

Source: Clemente De Lucia (BNP Paribas), July-August 2014.

The evidence by country varies. De Lucia focuses on the total proportion of services sub-categories with inflation below 2%. That statistic is rising, De Lucia notes, in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Netherlands, and France. From that he concludes that deflationary pressure is mounting in those countries.

(Beware that, in those charts, the three categories are nested. That is, the category of "below 2% inflation" includes the category of "below 1%" inflation, and so forth. I checked.) 

De Lucia's data end in May 2014. I gathered my own data to see what's happened over the past 12 months, for the eurozone aggregate. The proportion of service categories with inflation below 2% reached a maximum in February (70%), and has declined since then. The diffusion of deflation reached 18% in December 2013, and has fallen to about 5% in July.

It will be interesting to see a breakdown by country. So far, though, I'm not convinced that "domestic deflationary pressures" are mounting.

One interpretation of the ECB’s recent policies is that the bank is not reacting to today’s decline in the price of goods. Most of that is due to past declines in commodity prices—which the ECB has no control over— and to the past rise of the exchange rate—which the ECB doesn’t target. The ECB, instead, is reacting to the disinflation of services, and the risk (or expectation?) that it might turn into outright deflation. How serious is that threat?

Based on the (admittedly backward-looking) evidence surveyed here, the risk of "homegrown" deflation is there, but it's not increasing, imminent, or pervasive across countries. (De Lucia’s note continues with a promising, long section on inflation expectations, which I haven’t had time to read yet.)

A different interpretation is that the ECB sees deflation in goods as a problem it can solve—through the exchange rate. The euro appreciated steeply, through May, and that has driven the euro price of commodities lower. The new policies might be aimed at depreciation.

But that will have to wait for another blog.

*For visual clarity, I removed from the chart the three smallest members of the eurozone: Cyprus, Malta, and Luxembourg.

What caught my eye

1. How the government exaggerates the cost of education, by David Leonhardt at the New York Times.

But it turns out the government’s measure is deeply misleading.
For years, that measure was based on the list prices that colleges published in their brochures, rather than the actual amount students and their families paid. The government ignored financial-aid grants. Effectively, the measure tracked the price of college for rich families, many of whom were not eligible for scholarships, but exaggerated the price – and price increases – for everyone from the upper middle class to the poor.
[...]
Fortunately, the government isn’t the only organization that collects data on college tuition over time. The College Board also does, and it publishes different indexes on published tuition and net-price tuition, separately for public and private colleges. (Only scholarship grants are considered in the net-price calculation. Loans, appropriately, are treated as part of the tuition that families are really paying.)
Net tuition and fees at private four-year colleges have risen 22 percent since 1992, the College Board says, and the increase has been 60 percent at public four-year colleges. Community-college tuition has declined, because aid grants have outpaced published tuition. These numbers are obviously quite different from the government’s index showing a 107 percent increase.

The more challenging question is: Given the changes that we're about to see in how higher education is provided (online classes), how much will college cost in 20 years? (Hat tip to my wife, to whom I can't give a confident answer when she asks: "How much do we need to save for our [8-month-old] son's college?")

2. A measure of global systemic financial risk, from NYU Stern's V-lab, via Econbrowser, and a chart for China:

3. The U.S. can't inflate away its public debt, probably. From a recent paper by Jens Hilscher, Alon Raviv, and Ricardo Reis: Inflating away the public debt? An empirical assessment. [Ungated version.]

Abstract: We propose and implement a method that provides quantitative estimates of the extent to which higher- than-expected inflation can lower the real value of outstanding government debt. Looking forward, we derive a formula for the debt burden that relies on detailed information about debt maturity and claimholders, and that uses option prices to construct risk-adjusted probability distributions for inflation at different horizons. The estimates suggest that it is unlikely that inflation will lower the US fiscal burden significantly, and that the effect of higher inflation is modest for plausible counterfactuals. If instead inflation is combined with financial repression that ex post extends the maturity of the debt, then the reduction in value can be significant.

4. Valuing non-US equities: claims about the CAPE (cyclically-adjusted price-earnings) ratio, by Andrew Smithers. Part I. Part II.

5. The dark side of the Italian tomato. Also in French and Spanish.

Italy, the third largest agricultural producer after France and Germany, vies with Spain for first place in the production of vegetables. In the past 10 years, Italy has produced an average of 6 million tonnes of tomatoes per year (FAOSTAT). According to FAO, the exportation of concentrated Italian tomatoes was facilitated in 2001 by a reimbursement by the EU of 45 euros ($61) for every tonne of product exported (FAO). But that’s not all. Overall, according to Oxfam, the EU subsidises tomato production to the tune of approximately 34.5 euros ($47) per tonne, a subsidy that covers 65% of the market price of the final product (Oxfam). But who in Brussels is aware of the paradox of subsidising an export product that dumps on local produce in Africa? 

The European Union subsidizes local production of farm products, which puts Africans out of work in their home countries, which drives them to migrate to Europe, lowering wages in Europe. In the end, the tomato pickers might enjoy the same expected utility in Africa than in Europe, after cost and quality of living are accounted for. European producers win, African producers go out of business.

One might argue the subsidies are a net positive if tomato production is more efficient in Europe than in Africa. But if that were the case, then why would European production need to be subsidized? Leaving aside that, what's the effect of European subsidies? European farmers win, the impact on everybody else is uncertain, at best.

What caught my eye

1. Benjamin Friedman describes the perils of downsizing the central bank's balance sheet. It wasn't my first guess, though. Friedman argues that, by holding an assortment of assets, central banks have acquired a new tool to fine-tune monetary policy.

2. A three-part essay on alternative measures of inflation, on the website of the Atlanta Fed, by Mike Bryan, the father of the trimmed CPI and the median CPI.

3. Australia proposes to raise the retirement age to... 70! (on Bloomberg)

4. Excellent review of the consensus view why the "natural" interest rate has tumbled, by Larry Summers (via John Cochrane).

5. The TIOBE index: the most popular programming languages.

6. A comparison of programming languages in economics, by Aruoba and Fernández-Villaverde, from this week's batch of NBER working papers.

7. Can productivity rise forever? A partial discussion of the main issues, by Robin Harding at the FT.

8. Repeat after me: banks do not "lend out" reserves, by Paul Sheard at S&P, via David Andolfatto. David commented on Sheard's note, and was quickly corrected by Nick Rowe. David has now written a simple model to think through the issue of excess reserves and inflation risk. Don't you love economics blogs??

Chart of the week

The core PCE inflation rate has slowed down from 2% to 1% in two years. The chart above, from Bloomberg, shows the contribution to that decline of the inflation rate of different categories of personal consumption expenditures (vertical axis).

Health care services make the largest contribution to disinflation, about one third, in part because they have a large weight in the price index. This disinflation in medical services is thought to be a one-off, the result of lower Medicare reimbursements as part of the 2013 budget sequestration, and the expiration of patents on some drugs, which opened the floodgates to generic alternatives.

The category with the sharpest deceleration, however, in inflation (horizontal axis) was clothing. That seems to be the continuation of a decades-long trend of declining prices of apparel, as the share of imported clothing increases and prices of those imports decline.