Sunday, November 28, 2021

Inflation Explainer

Bari Weiss asked me to write a short post for her substack offering some inflation explanations on the occasion of post-Thanksgiving shopping.  

It’s Black Friday, ‘70s-Style

Black Friday begins tonight, and Americans, after emerging from our collective turkey coma, will dive into our sacred, national ritual: shopping. 

Those who haven’t shopped lately are in for a rude awakening: Many items will be out of stock, delayed or cost a lot more than they used to. Welcome to inflation, back from the 1970s!  

As you look for a deal on a Peloton to work off your pandemic paunch, here is a brief explanation about what’s going on with our economy, why so many things are becoming more expensive, why this hurts all of us, and why the government can’t spend its way out of this mess.

Why are prices rising? 

The news is full of “supply chain” problems. Shipping containers can’t get through our ports. Car-makers can’t get chips to make cars. Railroads look like the 405 at rush hour. 

What’s underlying many of these problems is the fact that businesses can’t find enough workers. There aren’t enough truck drivers, airline pilots, construction workers and warehouse workers in the “supply chain.” Restaurants can’t find waiters and cooks. There are 10 million job openings and only seven million people looking for work. About three million people who were working in March 2020 are no longer working or looking for work.

But supply chains wouldn’t be clogged if people weren’t trying to buy a lot. The fundamental issue is that demand is outstripping supply.

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Grumpy on inflation at CATO

I had a great time at the CATO monetary policy conference last week. A brief view on why we're having inflation and the chance it will continue:  


Briefly, a helicopter dropped. The Fed fell flat. And here we go. Grumpy got steamed up on this one. 

If the embed doesn't work, try the direct link or the above conference link. Greg Ip moderated well, and stick around for insightful comments from Fernando Martin, Mark Sobel, and David Beckworth.

Friday, November 19, 2021

A convenient myth: Climate risk and the financial system

A Convenient Myth: Climate risk and the financial system. At National Review Online. 

In an October 21 press release, Janet Yellen — Treasury secretary and head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), the umbrella group that unites all U.S. financial regulators — eloquently summarized a vast program to implement climate policy via financial regulation:

"FSOC is recognizing that climate change is an emerging and increasing threat to U.S. financial stability. This report puts climate change squarely at the forefront of the agenda of its member agencies and is a critical first step forward in addressing the threat of climate change."

You do not have to disagree with one iota of climate science — and I will not do so in this essay — to find this program outrageous, an affront to effective financial regulation, to effective climate policy, and to our system of government.

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Inflation meditation

The discussion about inflation is pretty confused. There is a lot of confusion about aggregate demand vs. individual demand, aggregate supply vs. supply, and about relative prices vs. inflation. 

My theme: Inflation is entirely about "demand," not "supply." Fixing the ports, the chips, the pipelines, the labor disincentives, the regulations, are all great and good, and the key to economic growth. But they will not on their own do much to slow inflation. We are having inflation because the government printed up a few trillion dollars, and borrowed a few trillion more, and wrote people checks. People are spending the checks. 

At a superficial level this is obvious. If people weren't spending a lot of money, the ports would not be clogged. But it's deeper than that. 

Inflation is all prices and wages going up at the same time. Relative price changes are when one price goes up and other prices go down. Reality combines the two, but let's use terms correctly for each element. 

Supply shocks cause relative price changes, not inflation. Suppose the ports clog up, and you can't get TVs off the boat from China. Then the price of TVs has to rise relative to other prices. The price of TVs has to go up relative to restaurant food, for example, so people buy fewer TVs and go out to eat more. Or the price of TVs has to go up relative to wages, so people buy less overall. 

Now the world is a bit more complex. If prices and wages moved instantly, the price of restaurant food, or wages, would go down, the price of TVs would go up, and the overall price level would not change. In reality the other prices go down slowly. So the price of TVs goes up, and other prices and wages only slowly go down. We measure a little bit of inflation, followed by a slow period of lower measured inflation. 

This is one of the mechanisms people have in mind when they refer to supply shocks, and say inflation will be transitory. But that's clearly not what's happening now. Everything is going up, though some things more than others. 

Likewise what happens if people decide in a pandemic that they want to buy more TVs and go out to dinner less? That's a relative demand shock. It drives up the price of TVs, and down the price of restaurant food with no inflation. But restaurant prices go down more slowly than TV prices go up, so we measure a bit of inflation and then less inflation. But that's not what's happening now. Restaurant prices are going up too. 

"Aggregate supply" is the question, how much more does the economy produce when all prices and wages are moving up at the same rate -- true, pure, inflation? That's a tricky and slippery concept! Sure, if wages rise more than prices, workers might work harder and produce more. If prices rise more than wages, companies might produce more in pursuit of higher profits. Since I told the same story both ways, you can see even this is slippery. But these stories are still about relative prices and wages, not both prices and wages rising together. If prices rise 10% and wages rise 10%, why does anybody do anything different? Welcome to the mysteries of "aggregate supply." 

It only makes sense if you think prices or wages were sticky and one or the other was stuck at too low a level. Then a bit of inflation can unstick one of the two, getting the economy back to a more productive level. Aggregate supply is about sticky prices and wages, not about the actual productive capacity of the economy. Another way to see it: Why was the economy not already producing as much as it could, so that money raises output rather than immediately raising inflation? Well, something had to be wrong that inflation could fix, and in macro theory that's "sticky prices." 

Yes, this is slippery, but let's not get too far down the rabbit hole. The central point, as intuitive as it sounds, it is not true that unclogging the ports will soak up demand and stop pure inflation. It will lower the relative price of TVs, but that "more supply" doesn't do much about all prices and wages rising together. 

All prices and wages rising together means that one thing is falling in value -- money, and government debt. Inflation is a change in the relative price of money and government debt relative to everything else. Inflation comes thus, fundamentally, from the overall supply vs. demand for money and government debt. 

We seem, sadly, to be repeating all the confusion on these affairs that prevailed in the 1970s. Oil price "supply" shocks will surely be "transitory." President Biden is sending the FTC to hound the oil companies to lower prices.  Can "guideposts" be far behind? For a thousand years, inflation has led to a witch hunt after "speculators" and "middlemen" and price rising conspiracies. Here we go. 




Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Academic Freedom at Stanford -- commentary

This is a follow up to a post on the Stanford faculty petition on free speech. I place my comments here, in a separate post. I want to be super-clear that the signatories signed the letter of the last post, and endorse nothing else. 

What does it say? Free speech, free inquiry, academic freedom. Period. Not free speech so long as nobody feels hurt. Not free speech so long as you don't disagree with or are viewed as not fully supporting Stanford's policy on Diversity,  Equity, and Inclusion. Not free speech except if you disagree with Stanford's or the County of Santa Clara's covid policies, or Stanford's "sustainability" principles. Not free speech, but limited to your domain of academic expertise, determined by some bureaucratic process. There are other faculty groups and committees working on all these "free-speech but" policies. This group endorsed free speech, period.  

Academic Freedom at Stanford

 Academic Freedom at Stanford

[This petition was sent to the president of Stanford on April 13th, 2021]

The signatories of this letter are concerned about the state of academic freedom in American universities. Freedom of expression and open inquiry are vital to the search for truth, which is the core mission of the academic enterprise. To preserve the integrity of our mission, and to signal the importance of free speech in universities everywhere, we urge the president and board of trustees of Stanford to join the more than 80 other universities to publicly endorse the University of Chicago statement on free expression, and to state that it is Stanford university policy.

Sincerely, 

The undersigned

*********

The Petition and signatories are here.  185 faculty signed the original; 7 have asked that their names be dropped from the public version. 



Monday, November 15, 2021

Fed courage.

From Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 

How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?

Kristian S. Blickle, Sarah N. Hamerling, and Donald P. Morgan

Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no. 990 November 2021

Abstract

Not very. We find that weather disasters over the last quarter century had insignificant or small effects on U.S. banks’ performance. This stability seems endogenous rather than a mere reflection of federal aid. Disasters increase loan demand, which offsets losses and actually boosts profits at larger banks. Local banks tend to avoid mortgage lending where floods are more common than official flood maps would predict, suggesting that local knowledge may also mitigate disaster impacts.

Key words: hurricanes, wildfires, floods, climate change, weather disasters, FEMA, banks, financial stability, local knowledge

Hoover Fellows

It's time to get those applications in for the Hoover Fellows program

This is a program for young scholars. It's a real job, not a postdoc -- 5 year contract, renewable for another 5 years. No teaching required. It's appropriate for new PhDs but especially for people several years out of PhD.  The current Hoover Fellows are here, an impressive group. We hire in history, political science, and related fields as well as economics. The point is scholarship; you're expected to develop an academic career. It's not a policy job and there are no requirements, though people with interests and research that bear on public policy are obviously going to be a better fit and get more out of being here. There are few rules or strings attached. Take it from me, working at Hoover is a wonderful job! 

Please pass the word on to people you may know who would make a good fit. 

For those of you who would like to spend a year at Hoover, it's time to apply to the National Fellows program

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

Woke week

The institutions of civil society are now thoroughly politicized. "Wokeness" is their ideology and religion,  and mastering an ever-changing arcane vocabulary is now the key to access to the elite, as well as making sure you're not the next one sent to the proverbial Gulag. 

I can't keep up with everything in this vein. Still, I've been silent long enough, so I think it's worth passing along interesting tidbits as they come. 

A few items on this theme came across the transom last week, that seem fun to share. The American Medical Association issued an official 54 page document instructing all doctors on proper language. (Twitter source with more commentary.) 

Mind you, as in other cases, this isn't just opinion -- I'm a radical free speech advocate, say and write what you want. It's the official opinion of a scientific professional society, formerly a-political. 

It starts: 


I found this document interesting, among other reasons, because I thought I already spoke woke. I thought the left hand column was already the Proper Terminology. They are, after all, already in the mandatory passive voice. How wrong I was! How many more mouthfuls of word salad it is going to take to get through a sentence. Or.. last point, to get an article accepted in a medical journal.