Writing from the Netherlands after visiting future clients this week; here is a summary of my post-CPI tweets (Follow me @inflation_guy) :
- very surprising core inflation, barely rounded up to 0.1% month/month. Waiting for breakdown, but Shelter was still +0.1% so something odd.
- Core CPI ex-shelter only 1.39%, not terribly far from the 2010 lows.
- …part of the answer is that core commodities decelerated further, -0.1% y/y. But core services, most of which is housing, ALSO decel.
- Major groups; Accel: Food/Bev (15.3%); Decel: Apparel, Transp, Medical Care, Educ/Comm (34.3%). Balance unch on y/y rate rounded to tenths.
- Housing actually accelerated slightly. So decline in core was apparel, Medical Care, Education, and non-fuel transportation. Hmmm.
- …If you believe core is going to keep falling, you DON’T want to bet on it being led lower by Medical Care and Education.
- We expect this to be the low print on core. Our forecast remains 2.6%-3.0% for 2013, but only 0.6% has been realized so far
- It wd probably be prudent to lower our 4cast range; we will if there is another miss lower in May. But not by much: housing still the driver.
I think the sixth bullet is the key point: core inflation is drooping because of Medical Care and Education & Communication decelerating. This is terrific news, but there’s about forty years of history that should lead one to be skeptical that these are the categories that will lead inflation lower.
Our forecast for 2.6%-3.0% is based on an expected acceleration in rents, based on the recent rise in home prices. We’re not changing that forecast yet because our model didn’t expect the acceleration to happen yet. However, it should begin to happen in the next 1-3 months.
If primary and Owners’ Equivalent rents don’t begin to accelerate in the next month or two, we will lower our 2013 forecast simply because it will be difficult to see a sufficient acceleration to reach our goal with only a half year or so to go. But the reason we don’t lower our forecast much is that the primary driver here is still rents, and there is no question which way rent inflation is headed. Only if we conclude that for some strange reason there is going to be a permanent shift in the capitalization rate of owner-occupied housing (that is, if there is a permanent shift in the ratio of rents to prices from what it has historically been) would we reconsider the direction of our forecast, and then only if home prices stopped launching higher.
Meanwhile, weak growth numbers, soft inflation numbers, and the seeming success of the Abe program in Japan as growth there has abruptly surprised higher (although it cannot be attributable to the BOJ monetization, since that program hasn’t been around long enough to affect the real economy even if there is money illusion at work) ought to cause any silly talk about the “taper” of the Fed’s buying program. That was always due for enormous skepticism, but with all of the arrows pointing the wrong way there is almost no chance that the FOMC will elect to taper purchases in the next few months. Indeed, I would expect the “hints” of such action to cease in short order. The only reason to talk about it is to (a) convince the world that Fed policy is credible, but a ruling on that credibility won’t be made until the episode is over, based on results, not at this time and based on what they say; or (b) because there is little cost of doing so, since the markets won’t panic if there’s no chance of near-term implementation.