from Arcadia Economics
Peter Schiff: Fed is Still Clueless On Stagflation
by Peter Schiff
Schiff Sovereign
In June 2022, when inflation was raging at over 9% in the US, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell admitted to a reporter, “we now understand better how little we understand about inflation.”
“Uh, that’s not very reassuring,” the reporter chuckled.
Talk about an understatement. The Fed Chairman has the power to control virtually everything in the economy.
He can conjure trillions of dollars out of thin air practically at will. He can raise and lower interest rates, push businesses and governments into bankruptcy, and cause people to lose their jobs.
Yet he flat-out admitted they didn’t have a clue about inflation.
This Should Be a Five-Alarm Fire for Anyone Who Cares About Inflation
With the 2024 election approaching, the central bank’s independence is on the line.
by Catherine Rampell
Washington Post
Donald Trump, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, wants to kneecap the Federal Reserve. This should be a five-alarm fire for anyone who claims to care about inflation.
The former president and his advisers keep finding new ways to outdo themselves on bad economic ideas. Should Trump be granted a second term, he plans to slash the labor supply by ratcheting down immigration (including legal, work-authorized immigration). He wants to devalue the dollar. He’d levy worldwide tariffs of 10 percent or higher, plus perhaps a 100 percent tariff on some Chinese goods, apparently failing to notice that the costs of his previous tariffs fell almost entirely on American consumers.
Now, according to a Wall Street Journal scoop, Trump also wants to strip the Fed of its political independence. Proposed changes include enabling the president to fire the Fed chair at will, or even play a role in setting interest rates himself.
US Federal Reserve Holds Interest Rates Steady as Inflation Ticks Up
Fed announces it will keep interest rates at 5.25% to 5.5% as rate of inflation remains above target of 2%
by Lauren Aratani
The Guardian
The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it is holding interest rates steady at 5.25% to 5.5%, their highest level in two decades, as inflation continues to dog the US economy.
Though some had hoped the Fed would soon cut interest rates, which are at their highest level since 2007, the annual rate of inflation has stubbornly remained above 3%. The Fed’s target rate is 2%.
“The committee does not expect it will be appropriate to reduce the target range until it has gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2%,” the Fed said in a statement that was largely unchanged from its statement after its previous meeting in March, when it also kept rates steady. “The committee will carefully assess incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks.”
Breitbart Business Digest: The Fed Finally Realized Progress On Inflation Has Stalled
by John Carney
Breitbart.com
Inflation Also Rises: A Fed Story
The Federal Reserve admitted yesterday that progress on inflation has stalled and that it will take longer for the Fed to achieve the confidence it needs to cut interest rates.
The Fed’s official statement was expanded to include the statement that “in recent months, there has been a lack of further progress toward the Committee’s 2 percent inflation objective.” In the press conference, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was even more explicit, going so far as to state that “further progress in bringing [inflation] down is not assured and the path forward is certain.”
It’s been quite a roller-coaster for the Fed. Last summer, Fed officials still believed that monetary policy was not sufficiently restrictive. At the June meeting, the Fed kept its benchmark federal funds rate unchanged at the range of five percent to 5.25 percent, but the median projection showed officials expected more hikes last year.
Expect Higher Interest Rates Through the End of 2024. Fed Blames ‘Lack of Progress’ On Inflation
You’ll likely pay more to borrow until at least 2025, but now may be the time to lock in higher savings rates.
by Richard Trenholm
c|net
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell had some sobering words for those anxiously anticipating rate cuts in 2024: “The path forward is uncertain.”
The Fed on Wednesday decided to hold the federal funds rate at a target range of 5.25% to 5.50% for the sixth straight time after three months of hotter-than-expected inflation reports. Inflation currently sits at 3.5% year over year, according to the Consumer Price Index’s April 10 report.
At previous meetings this year, Powell said the committee needed more data to make a decision and stuck to its forecast of three rate cuts “at some point this year.” But on Wednesday, Powell noted that a “lack of progress” on inflation in the first quarter could delay those cuts.
Has Pay Kept Up with Inflation?
by Wendy Edelberg
The Brookings Institution
There are various ways to evaluate recent trends in real pay (i.e., nominal pay adjusted for inflation), including using different measures of pay, measures of inflation, and reference periods. These factors can lead to conflicting conclusions about the trends in real pay in the United States. In October 2023, we published a detailed analysis breaking down these differences.
The interactive below shows you the annualized percent change in real pay from a base fourth quarter of your choice to the most recent quarter with available data. For each time period of your choice, this interactive will show you the change in real pay using four different pay measures and two different inflation measures. You can hover over the legend or the bars themselves to see percent changes in pay. The title of each figure will show the time period over which the change is calculated.
Governments Could Stop Inflating if They Wanted, but They Won’t
by Daniel Lacalle
Mises.org
Price inflation is no coincidence. It is a policy. Governments, along with their so-called experts, attempt to persuade you that price inflation stems from anything other than the consistent, albeit slower, rise in aggregate prices year after year. Issuing more currency than the private sector demands, thus eroding its purchasing power and creating a constant annual transfer of wealth from real wages and deposit savings to the government.
Oil prices are not a cause of inflation but a consequence. Prices increase as more units of the currency used to denominate the commodity shift to relatively scarce assets. Therefore, oil prices do not cause inflation; they are one of the signals of currency debasement. Furthermore, if oil prices caused inflation, we would go from inflation to deflation quickly, not from elevated inflation to slower price increases.
I’m an Economist: Here Are My Predictions for Inflation if Biden Wins Again
by Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy
Yahoo! Finance
Earlier this year, Fed officials had indicated that they would implement three rate cuts. However, said officials have since been telegraphing that cuts will probably occur later than previously anticipated. The Fed seems to have now shifted to a “wait and see” approach due to both sticky inflation and strong economic data.
“In recent months, there has been a lack of further progress toward the Committee’s 2% inflation objective,” Fed officials said in a May 1 statement.
Jerome Powell On Stagflation
by Martin Armstrong
Armstrong Economics
“I don’t see the ‘stag’ or the ‘-flation’,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said during his Wednesday address.
Powell believed inflation would be “transitory.” He believed that the economy would come down for a “soft landing.” He believed we would enter the year and see numerous cuts due to waning inflation coming closer to the fictional 2% target. Yet again, Chairman Jerome Powell has missed the mark on stagflation.
If you really look at it, objectively, interest rates always rise during boom periods, and they decline during recessions and depressions. We will see increased inflation, probably into 2028 caused by shortages and war. But you’re looking at a declining economic growth, so that ends up being more like the economy of the 1970s, and you’re looking at what we call “Stagflation” where the inflation rate will be higher than economic growth.
Fed Keeps Rates Unchanged, Noting Progress On Inflation Has Stalled
by John Carney
Breitbart.com
Federal Reserve officials agreed on Wednesday to hold interest rates steady for the sixth consecutive meeting, signaling that they are willing to keep rates at the highest level in more than two decades for longer than previously expected and noting that progress on bringing down inflation has stalled.
The central bank left its benchmark federal funds rate unchanged in a range between 5.25 percent and 5.5 percent, as it awaits more evidence that inflation is sustainably falling to its two percent target.
The Fed last raised the fed funds rate in July, with Fed chairman Jerome Powell saying at the time that it was too soon to tell whether inflation was cooling enough to rule out further hikes. At the following meeting in September, the projections of Fed officials suggested that the Fed might raise rates one more time before the end of the year.