Fed: “We don’t have a really good understanding of why it’s been so difficult to get inflation back up”

credit: sundance at CTH

A good day for a MAGAnomic pause and reminder…

In 2015 we discussed candidate Trump’s economic positions and how they would impact the economy.  CTH anticipated that MAGAnomics would be reversing three decades of federal reserve monetary policy. After about a year of analysis and discussion, in 2016 CTH presented a theory: “A new Dimension in Modern Economics“.

CTH shared a possibility of what could happen if Trump Economic Policy was shifted to favor Main St. over Wall St.  One aspect we presented was how Federal Reserve monetary policy would be oddly disconnected from its ability to influence inflation… Today:

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – The Federal Reserve could find itself fighting too-low inflation for years to come, San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly said on Friday, and may need a new policy framework to lift inflation back up to the Fed’s 2% goal.

“We don’t have a really good understanding of why it’s been so difficult to get inflation back up,” Daly said at the annual American Economics Association meeting in San Diego.

But with global growth slowing and the populations of most advanced economies aging, Daly said, “this new ‘fighting inflation from below’ is going to be with us, I would argue, for a longer period of time than just a few years.” (read more)

While the Federal Reserve is perplexed, the underlying reason for monetary policy to be incapable of impacting the rate of inflation is not too complex when you think about the focus of federal economic policy reversing in the era of Trump.

For 30-years +/- U.S. economic policy was geared toward Wall Street.  Corporations looked to maximize profits, manufacturing was shipped overseas, jobs were lost and Main Street suffered.  The Fed monetary policy followed the economic influences of a Wall Street created outcome. U.S. multinationals benefited; U.S. main street companies did not.

A Wall St. economic engine was created. The FED policy followed the new engine. The two entirely different economic engines then detached:

• The Wall Street economy, an engine of sorts, is a “service driven” economy, with manufacturing of cheap imported goods done overseas.
• The Main Street economy, again another engine, is a more balanced “manufacturing” economy; with a balance of imports and finished goods produced in the USA.

Bush, Clinton-Clinton, Bush-Bush and Obama-Obama terms focused on the Wall Street economy.  However, Donald Trump focuses on the Main Street economy.  In 2016, immediately after the election, we wrote about what we might expect to see happen:

2016 […]  Understanding the distance between the real Main Street economic engine and the false Wall Street economic engine will help all of us to understand the scope of an upcoming economic lag; which, rather remarkably I would add, is a very interesting dynamic.

Think about these engines doing a turn about and beginning a rapid reverse.  GDP can, and in my opinion, will, expand quickly.  However, any interest rate hikes (monetary policy) intended to cool down that expansion -fearful of inflation- will take a long time to traverse the divide.

Additionally, inflation on durable goods will be insignificant – even as international trade agreements are renegotiated.  Why?  Simply because the originating nations of those products are going to go through the same type of economic detachment described above.

Those global manufacturing economies will first respond to any increases in export costs (tariffs etc.), by driving their own productivity higher as an initial offset, in the same manner American workers went through in the past two decades.  The manufacturing enterprise and the financial sector remain focused on the pricing.

♦ Inflation on imported durable goods sold in America, while necessary, will ultimately be minimal during this initial period; and expand more significantly as time progresses and off-shored manufacturing finds less and less ways to be productive.   Over time, durable good prices will increase – but it will come much later.

♦ Inflation on domestic consumable goods ‘may‘ indeed rise at a faster pace. However, it can be expected that U.S. wage rates will respond faster, naturally faster, than any monetary policy influence because inflation on fast-turn consumable goods becomes re-coupled to the ability of wage rates to afford them.

The fiscal policy impact lag, caused by the distance between federal fiscal action and the domestic Main Street economy, will now work in our favor.  That is, in favor of the middle-class. (full outline)

What we are seeing in 2019 is precisely this outcome.