OK then, raise the interest ra

2023-05-16

OK then, raise the interest rate by 1000 basis pts, destroy the whole US economy in deep dark recession then restart building from scratch again. In this case, we have totally taken inflation out of the equation. Good for investors also, we shall put in fresh money to start the a new bull run from. The lowest point

Why The Fed Should Keep Its Paws Off The Pause Button

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Goldox
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In this case, we have totally taken inflation out of the equation. Good for investors also, we shall put in fresh money to start the a new bull run from. The lowest point&nbsp;</body></html>","htmlText":"<html><head></head><body>OK then, raise the interest rate by 1000 basis pts, destroy the whole US economy in deep dark recession&nbsp;then restart building from scratch again. In this case, we have totally taken inflation out of the equation. Good for investors also, we shall put in fresh money to start the a new bull run from. The lowest point&nbsp;</body></html>","text":"OK then, raise the interest rate by 1000 basis pts, destroy the whole US economy in deep dark recession then restart building from scratch again. In this case, we have totally taken inflation out of the equation. Good for investors also, we shall put in fresh money to start the a new bull run from. The lowest point","highlighted":2,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":11,"commentSize":10,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"link":"https://ttm.financial/post/9970179440","repostId":2335818761,"repostType":2,"repost":{"id":"2335818761","pubTimestamp":1684195263,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/2335818761?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2023-05-16 08:01","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Why The Fed Should Keep Its Paws Off The Pause Button","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=2335818761","media":"seekingalpha","summary":"Right now the prospects for inflation are driving everything in markets. Markets are now, as they ha","content":"<html><head></head><body>Right now the prospects for inflation are driving everything in markets. Markets are now, as they have been since the start of the Fed tightening, eager for the Fed to stop tightening and for business to return to normal. Banking sector problems have added to these concerns. There has been, from the start of this inflation process, a certain denial that inflation was real, that it would last, and even that it was dangerous. Not only do markets seem to not appreciate the risks but the Federal Reserve seems to have set them aside as well for its own reasons and perhaps reasons that it has come subsequently to regret.There are several threads of commentary that weave through the various discussions of why the Federal Reserve should stop raising rates. Some hold that it should not even have been raising rates at all. I find this a curious argument. Clearly, inflation is high, and inflation clearly has been progressing at a pace well above the level of interest rates. Historically we look at inflation &#39;higher than interest rates&#39; as a period of accommodative monetary policy, not a period with restrictive monetary policy that we would expect to eventually get inflation under control.Implicit in the view of people who are looking for the Fed to stop hiking rates soon and start cutting them is the view that inflation will go down on its own when it&#39;s time. This is an interesting idea but it&#39;s an idea without any historic precedent… or merit.Nonetheless, we have heard both Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Senate Banking Committee member Elizabeth Warren opine the same argument that the Fed should not be raising rates because the Fed is confused about the cause of inflation. They argue that inflation is caused by supply shocks and by the war in Ukraine and that monetary policy will have no impact on these things. While there is certainly some merit to parts of these arguments, they seem to miss the point: supply shocks and the war may have started inflation, but now inflation has taken on a life of its own and policy needs to deal with it, and reel it in, not ignore it.Regardless of what started the inflation process, inflation is now in gear and it&#39;s the job of slowing inflation and controlling it that monetary policy must attend to. At this point it doesn&#39;t matter what started the inflation; what matters is to stop it and to contain people&#39;s perceptions of it and to reel back people&#39;s inflation expectations and their extrapolation of continuing price increases in the future.Chart 1<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/eb451654cf382f8e4920022c5711f198\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"424\"/>&#34;Demand&#34; Vs &#34;Supply&#34; Inflation (Haver Analytics and FAO Economics)Those who think that inflation continues to be caused by the war in Ukraine or by supply chain problems need to explain Chart 1 to me. Chart 1 shows that PPI inflation, which is the inflation gauge closest to production, has inflation falling sharply. On the other hand, the CPI which is the inflation rate experienced by consumers, and is linked to demand is the inflation rate that is higher and sticky. If inflation is caused by the supply side we would expect to see this result flipped. We&#39;d expect to see PPI inflation higher and CPI inflation lower. Instead, what we see is the situation that I described above which is where inflation began being triggered by excess fiscal policy, excess monetary policy, supply shocks, and the war in Ukraine and now these factors have combined to put something in motion that needs to be stopped. Clearly, monetary policy has a purpose and a role.There&#39;s another broad thread about that policy that argues that policy should do the least damage possible to the economy and should seek a soft landing. Some economists look back at the 1969-1970 recession and do not consider it a recession. Alan Blinder, former vice chair at the Federal Reserve, has referred to it as a sort of recessionette arguing that output barely fell by more than 1/2 of a percentage point in that recession; he maintains that it was some sort of a soft landing - although the unemployment rate did rise by 2.6 percentage points. I view the 1969-70 recession very differently. I see it as the gateway to the onset of the inflation problem. It is the first recession of this period, but not the first episode in which the Fed raised interest rates only to back off and find inflation was higher after it raised rates. The Fed did this in the mid-1960s while avoiding a recession altogether. They did it again in 1970 and then they did it again in the 1973-75 recession. No one would call the 1973-75 recession a soft landing. However, like the 1969-70 recession it&#39;s a recession in which the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and then cut them early leaving the inflation rate higher at the end of the recession than it was before the recession began. These recession episodes sowed the seeds of an inflation that grew culminating in the draconian monetary policy of the 1980s. Now, some want to do it again…When I hear economists talk about soft landings and when I look back at history at the sorts of things that occurred during periods when they label episodes as soft landings, I get very worried about what will happen in this episode if the Federal Reserve shoots for a soft landing. Inflation already is far too high, and we have no recession. Were we to have a recession where the Fed cut interest rates early and did not keep the pressure on, I would certainly not want to have the economy emerge from this recession with the inflation rate even higher than what it is now. And this is the problem with the soft-landing crowd. They seem to be unconcerned by such a possibility.When the Fed adopted its new framework agreement it shifted to aiming at an average inflation target, it prioritized full employment, and, in some sense, it downgraded its 2% inflation target by saying it was going to allow inflation to overshoot and that it would not raise interest rates until the economy had reached maximum employment. These changes are the facts underlying the framework agreement that governed the conduct of monetary policy before and after COVID struck. They set the Fed on a new and different path that it had never been on before. The Fed let inflation move over its 2% target and stay over its target for over a year before it began to raise rates at all - a stunning decision.The question now is what does the Fed think it should be doing? Does it still embrace its new framework statement? If so, does that mean that if the unemployment rate rises the Fed will back off on rate hikes? Or has the Fed learned a lesson about prioritizing full employment and does it realize that inflation has become a much more severe problem and needs to be prioritized? We often seem to hear that line of thought from the Fed Chairman and from other Federal Reserve officials, but they also say that in tandem arguing that they need to make sure they do not do undue damage to the economy. That caveat muddies the water. In terms of the Fed&#39;s intentions, I have to say I am more confused than I ever have been about what the Fed really plans to do. And I am not sure that people who are pushing for and endorsing the soft landing understand the extent to which a soft landing will interfere with making inflation progress.No one knows what inflation is going to do in the period ahead. At one of the recent annual meetings sponsored by the Kansas City Fed in Jackson Hole Wyoming, it was established that none of the widely followed inflation theories works all the time. Various theories seem to work at various times and then they breakdown. However, we know in the past when we&#39;ve had inflation and when the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates and there has been a recession the inflation rate has generally come down if the Federal Reserve did not ease interest rates too quickly in the recession itself or early in the recovery.Charts document that inflation progress is slow.Chart 2CPI inflation progress is slow<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/8a72e71eedbba3f71dbc58446beea7d7\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"387\"/>Very slow inflation progress (Haver Analytics and FAO Economics)Chart two shows the progress of inflation since July 2022. Headline inflation has come down more rapidly, while core inflation has declined very little. However, there may be reason to think that current inflation progress has stepped up a little bit more.Chart 3<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/0275d3f88b667785a539c29f8a15e41b\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"387\"/>3-Month annualized inflation (Haver Analytics and FAO Economics)Chart 3 shows a short-term point of view. This chart emphasizes what inflation is doing in the near term rather than what the year over year pace is since it focuses on annualized inflation rates over the three-month periods. Here we see three-month inflation in the core and headlines of the CPI were running at a pace of nearly 10%, however, by December 2022, those inflation rates had come down to the 3% to 4% range. However, since then CPI core inflation over three months has flattened out at about 5% while the headline firmed and it&#39;s now back at a pace of around 3.2%.This chart gives us a little bit more optimism about making progress on inflation. The Federal Reserve doesn&#39;t usually look at shorter-term inflation rates because they&#39;re too volatile. However, when we look at a longer-term inflation rate, what you can see from this chart is an inflation rate that spans the July 22 to April 23 period, and is going to incorporate some high inflation periods in July and August of 2022 along with some lower inflation periods that are more recent. Are we distorting the picture of inflation progress by mixing these two very different trends together?Well… that&#39;s something to be open-minded about. The other thing to remember is that while the core inflation rate has dropped by nearly half, measuring inflation at its three-month pace it has still only dropped to 5% not to 2% - free of the &#39;contamination&#39; of averaging. And from December 2022 the core inflation rate not only has been stable but it has actually picked up slightly. Inflation options need to consider all these trends.These trends point to more good news in the making and that is simply to recognize that as we move ahead calculating year over year inflation rates the high inflation rates from early 2022 are going to fall out of the calculation and that means that the year-over-year inflation rates are going to fall faster than they have been falling. And that&#39;s good news.As I mentioned earlier, we can&#39;t be sure what inflation is going to do in the period ahead this means monetary policy wants to be careful; it does not want to assume that progress is going to continue at a strong pace nor does it want to think if progress is slow that the pace can&#39;t speed up either. Future policy needs to have some flexibility but it also needs to be realistic in what it can do and what it can expect.One important way to look at inflation is to recognize that year-over-year inflation is nothing more than the multiplied one-month percentage changes of the last 12 months. We currently have CPI data through April; at the time of the May inflation report, we&#39;ll have 11 of the same month-to-month changes that the April report has. May will drop the (known) oldest month-to-month change and it will add a new one (unknown) for the month of May. Mechanically that&#39;s why the year of inflation rate doesn&#39;t change very much from month-to-month. But we can see by looking at these monthly inflation data that we are losing that they are going to be relatively high numbers whereas the inflation numbers we&#39;re going to be gaining - if they are in keeping with the recent monthly trends we&#39;ve had - are going to be much lower. So that&#39;s grounds for optimism and getting the year-over-year inflation rate lower. But are we going to get it low enough? Based on current trends the answer seems to be &#39;no.&#39; And this is why I caution the Fed not to be too quick to pause. One of the worst things that monetary policy can do is to go through stop-go phases. Moves like that confuse markets because they have a harder time figuring out the speed at which monetary policy will progress in the future. So, let&#39;s look at these month-to-month inflation changes and see what we can learn about what inflation is doing now.Chart 4<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/ec08e967b9d613fb0e4dc3ae3bb4ce0d\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"396\"/>Monthly frequency distribution of inflation (Haver Analytics and FAO Economics)Chart four shows frequency distributions of monthly CPI percentage changes. They make the case that inflation is not yet under enough control for the Fed to slow its pace of tightening. This is a chart of the frequency distribution of monthly headline and core inflation changes for two different periods. The recent period spans the most recent 24 months. The other period is the benchmark 4 years before COVID struck during which inflation was low. The point of this chart is to look at the distribution or monthly changes in inflation during a period when inflation was low and compare it to the distribution that we have currently to see if the distribution of price changes for the core or headline CPI is beginning to look the way they have looked in the past during a broad period of price stability.The answer here is a rousing &#39;no.&#39; The CPI core and the headline for the most recent 24 months show an extended frequency distribution to the right indicating that they have experienced some extreme the month-to-month changes in the headline and in the core CPI. During the four years of price stability before COVID struck we see the purple and the green series do not have extended frequency distributions to the right. The highest core increase during that four-year period was a gain of 0.3% month-to-month while the highest headline increase (the green series) was 0.5% month-to-month. Notice also during the period of price stability both the core and the headline series had observations at zero or even observations that were negative and there have been none of those over the past 24 months.These frequency distributions strongly suggest that we have not yet gotten back to a point of price stability and that, if we are going to get there, we&#39;ll have to have the period ahead appearing more like it was in the years prior to Covid.Chart 5<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/d7f0411b8b531112a2a5259193420116\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"389\"/>Inflation density functions (Haver Analytics and FAO Economics)If you don&#39;t find the frequency distribution charts compelling or if you find them confusing, I have also included above the density charts for the various distributions. The density charts add up the cumulative frequencies from the lowest percentage increases to the highest going from left to right. For example, the purple line which is for core inflation shows us that during the period of price stability 95.8% of the core observations we&#39;re 0.2% per month or lower- WOW! The headline CPI had a little more gradualness to it. Still, 58% of its month-to-month percent changes were a 0.1% or lower. It did that over four years, and had one month-to-month gain as large as 0.5% on the month.When we compare these two distributions to what we see over the last 24 months, there is no comparison as the 24-month distributions stretch well into much higher month-to-month percent changes.One obvious criticism here is that I&#39;m looking at 24-months which is a long period that has some of the higher monthly percent changes involved dating back to the time when inflation was more virulent. And I did that to try to gain more observations to look at in a 24-month period instead of just a 12-month period.Chart 6<img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/6be8a1fd6b1313ba36a3a4a120d9e083\" tg-width=\"640\" tg-height=\"392\"/>frequency distribution for last 12-months (Haver Analytics and FAO Economics)To assuage that criticism… Chart 6 shows the frequency distribution for the last 12 months for both the headline and the core. Both the headline in the core measures have some extreme observations that are still in the distribution and while they both have their modal (or, most frequent observation) at 0.4% (for the core the distribution is bimodal with 0.4% and 0.3% more frequent). That&#39;s still far too high for a 2% annual target. The distributions are still far too skewed to the right and only the headline has observations below 0.3% monthly. The Fed&#39;s inflation target is 2% and a steady diet of increases of 0.2% per month will set the annual rate for inflation at 2.4%. In CPI terms that gain is comparable to 2% on the PCE that the Fed targets since the CPI runs hotter than the PCE. However, the core doesn&#39;t have any increases that small over the last 12 months (the smallest is 0.3% or 3.7% annualized!).<h2>The facts argue for a stricter Fed, not a looser one</h2>My conclusion is that the facts argue for a stricter Fed not for a looser Fed, and not for a Fed that&#39;s going to take us into a pause early and hopes to glide into a soft landing on the further hope that in the soft landing inflation will continue to be reduced. History tells us that the world doesn&#39;t normally work that way. But now that we have had high inflation we know that inflation expectations are elevated. And we can see from the distribution of monthly changes that while we&#39;ve made some progress on inflation, we are still not close to generating the kind of increases month-in and month-out that are going to give us the kind of price discipline that we seek.Everything that we know about economics suggests that we need to keep more pressure on the economy, on producers, and on consumers to reduce demand pressures and reduce prices to the Fed&#39;s target pace of 2% on the PCE.This analysis suggests that if the Fed loosens policy early inflation will again get out of control and while the markets may like the Fed backing off at least initially - if this analysis is correct - and if it turns out that inflation remains stubborn or backtracks, market euphoria will be short-lived and the next round of pain would be devastating.<h2>Catch-22</h2>So there&#39;s a little bit of Joseph Heller in all of this. Joseph Heller wrote the book &#34;Catch-22,&#34; which is a wonderful book that I highly recommend. The title of the book stems from a hypothetical army regulation that says that if you&#39;re crazy you can get a deferment to get out of your military service. However, there&#39;s a catch. And that catch, known as catch-22, is that if you request to be let out of your military service on the basis that you&#39;re crazy, then you&#39;re sane enough to know that you&#39;re really not crazy and the clause no longer applies to you.I see this same sort of self-undermining logic in the belief that a soft-landing is the right course of action. Many want the economy to go back to normal and there was a long period of price stability before Covid. Many people simply assume that if the Fed just lets interest rates go back down to normal, inflation will go back to normal and everything will be fine and &#39;normal.&#39; But the world has changed. COVID changed the world and what&#39;s normal has changed too.The supply chains shifted. Labor market participation rates have shifted. And, most of all, inflation has shifted and inflation psychology has shifted. There is no reason to think anything is going to go back to the way it was because we&#39;re just not there anymore. That world, that environment, those conditions, no longer exist.<h2>I worry… and you should, too</h2>This is why I worry about the Fed not having staying power and not raising rates enough. I believe it has already damaged its reputation by denying inflation and by procrastinating on needed policy moves that let inflation climb even higher. I don&#39;t know what will happen if it makes that same mistake again with inflation already this high. And this is not just simply a concern about the Fed. It&#39;s also a concern about what it will mean for Fed policy, and for markets: for the bond market, for stocks, for the dollar, for gold, for commodities, and for everything. Fed policy desperately needs to restore price stability. Financial policy needs an anchor. The Fed can&#39;t pull that anchor up and trust that the currents will take us where it wants us to go. Every investor needs to be aware of this risk.</body></html>","source":"seekingalpha","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Why The Fed Should Keep Its Paws Off The Pause Button</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nWhy The Fed Should Keep Its Paws Off The Pause Button\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2023-05-16 08:01 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4604680-why-the-fed-should-keep-its-paws-off-the-pause-button>seekingalpha</a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\nRight now the prospects for inflation are driving everything in markets. Markets are now, as they have been since the start of the Fed tightening, eager for the Fed to stop tightening and for business...\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4604680-why-the-fed-should-keep-its-paws-off-the-pause-button\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{".IXIC":"NASDAQ Composite",".DJI":"道琼斯",".SPX":"S&P 500 Index"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4604680-why-the-fed-should-keep-its-paws-off-the-pause-button","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/5a36db9d73b4222bc376d24ccc48c8a4","article_id":"2335818761","content_text":"Right now the prospects for inflation are driving everything in markets. Markets are now, as they have been since the start of the Fed tightening, eager for the Fed to stop tightening and for business to return to normal. Banking sector problems have added to these concerns. There has been, from the start of this inflation process, a certain denial that inflation was real, that it would last, and even that it was dangerous. Not only do markets seem to not appreciate the risks but the Federal Reserve seems to have set them aside as well for its own reasons and perhaps reasons that it has come subsequently to regret.There are several threads of commentary that weave through the various discussions of why the Federal Reserve should stop raising rates. Some hold that it should not even have been raising rates at all. I find this a curious argument. Clearly, inflation is high, and inflation clearly has been progressing at a pace well above the level of interest rates. Historically we look at inflation 'higher than interest rates' as a period of accommodative monetary policy, not a period with restrictive monetary policy that we would expect to eventually get inflation under control.Implicit in the view of people who are looking for the Fed to stop hiking rates soon and start cutting them is the view that inflation will go down on its own when it's time. This is an interesting idea but it's an idea without any historic precedent… or merit.Nonetheless, we have heard both Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Senate Banking Committee member Elizabeth Warren opine the same argument that the Fed should not be raising rates because the Fed is confused about the cause of inflation. They argue that inflation is caused by supply shocks and by the war in Ukraine and that monetary policy will have no impact on these things. While there is certainly some merit to parts of these arguments, they seem to miss the point: supply shocks and the war may have started inflation, but now inflation has taken on a life of its own and policy needs to deal with it, and reel it in, not ignore it.Regardless of what started the inflation process, inflation is now in gear and it's the job of slowing inflation and controlling it that monetary policy must attend to. At this point it doesn't matter what started the inflation; what matters is to stop it and to contain people's perceptions of it and to reel back people's inflation expectations and their extrapolation of continuing price increases in the future.Chart 1\"Demand\" Vs \"Supply\" Inflation (Haver Analytics and FAO Economics)Those who think that inflation continues to be caused by the war in Ukraine or by supply chain problems need to explain Chart 1 to me. Chart 1 shows that PPI inflation, which is the inflation gauge closest to production, has inflation falling sharply. On the other hand, the CPI which is the inflation rate experienced by consumers, and is linked to demand is the inflation rate that is higher and sticky. If inflation is caused by the supply side we would expect to see this result flipped. We'd expect to see PPI inflation higher and CPI inflation lower. Instead, what we see is the situation that I described above which is where inflation began being triggered by excess fiscal policy, excess monetary policy, supply shocks, and the war in Ukraine and now these factors have combined to put something in motion that needs to be stopped. Clearly, monetary policy has a purpose and a role.There's another broad thread about that policy that argues that policy should do the least damage possible to the economy and should seek a soft landing. Some economists look back at the 1969-1970 recession and do not consider it a recession. Alan Blinder, former vice chair at the Federal Reserve, has referred to it as a sort of recessionette arguing that output barely fell by more than 1/2 of a percentage point in that recession; he maintains that it was some sort of a soft landing - although the unemployment rate did rise by 2.6 percentage points. I view the 1969-70 recession very differently. I see it as the gateway to the onset of the inflation problem. It is the first recession of this period, but not the first episode in which the Fed raised interest rates only to back off and find inflation was higher after it raised rates. The Fed did this in the mid-1960s while avoiding a recession altogether. They did it again in 1970 and then they did it again in the 1973-75 recession. No one would call the 1973-75 recession a soft landing. However, like the 1969-70 recession it's a recession in which the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and then cut them early leaving the inflation rate higher at the end of the recession than it was before the recession began. These recession episodes sowed the seeds of an inflation that grew culminating in the draconian monetary policy of the 1980s. Now, some want to do it again…When I hear economists talk about soft landings and when I look back at history at the sorts of things that occurred during periods when they label episodes as soft landings, I get very worried about what will happen in this episode if the Federal Reserve shoots for a soft landing. Inflation already is far too high, and we have no recession. Were we to have a recession where the Fed cut interest rates early and did not keep the pressure on, I would certainly not want to have the economy emerge from this recession with the inflation rate even higher than what it is now. And this is the problem with the soft-landing crowd. They seem to be unconcerned by such a possibility.When the Fed adopted its new framework agreement it shifted to aiming at an average inflation target, it prioritized full employment, and, in some sense, it downgraded its 2% inflation target by saying it was going to allow inflation to overshoot and that it would not raise interest rates until the economy had reached maximum employment. These changes are the facts underlying the framework agreement that governed the conduct of monetary policy before and after COVID struck. They set the Fed on a new and different path that it had never been on before. The Fed let inflation move over its 2% target and stay over its target for over a year before it began to raise rates at all - a stunning decision.The question now is what does the Fed think it should be doing? Does it still embrace its new framework statement? If so, does that mean that if the unemployment rate rises the Fed will back off on rate hikes? Or has the Fed learned a lesson about prioritizing full employment and does it realize that inflation has become a much more severe problem and needs to be prioritized? We often seem to hear that line of thought from the Fed Chairman and from other Federal Reserve officials, but they also say that in tandem arguing that they need to make sure they do not do undue damage to the economy. That caveat muddies the water. In terms of the Fed's intentions, I have to say I am more confused than I ever have been about what the Fed really plans to do. And I am not sure that people who are pushing for and endorsing the soft landing understand the extent to which a soft landing will interfere with making inflation progress.No one knows what inflation is going to do in the period ahead. At one of the recent annual meetings sponsored by the Kansas City Fed in Jackson Hole Wyoming, it was established that none of the widely followed inflation theories works all the time. Various theories seem to work at various times and then they breakdown. However, we know in the past when we've had inflation and when the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates and there has been a recession the inflation rate has generally come down if the Federal Reserve did not ease interest rates too quickly in the recession itself or early in the recovery.Charts document that inflation progress is slow.Chart 2CPI inflation progress is slowVery slow inflation progress (Haver Analytics and FAO Economics)Chart two shows the progress of inflation since July 2022. Headline inflation has come down more rapidly, while core inflation has declined very little. However, there may be reason to think that current inflation progress has stepped up a little bit more.Chart 33-Month annualized inflation (Haver Analytics and FAO Economics)Chart 3 shows a short-term point of view. This chart emphasizes what inflation is doing in the near term rather than what the year over year pace is since it focuses on annualized inflation rates over the three-month periods. Here we see three-month inflation in the core and headlines of the CPI were running at a pace of nearly 10%, however, by December 2022, those inflation rates had come down to the 3% to 4% range. However, since then CPI core inflation over three months has flattened out at about 5% while the headline firmed and it's now back at a pace of around 3.2%.This chart gives us a little bit more optimism about making progress on inflation. The Federal Reserve doesn't usually look at shorter-term inflation rates because they're too volatile. However, when we look at a longer-term inflation rate, what you can see from this chart is an inflation rate that spans the July 22 to April 23 period, and is going to incorporate some high inflation periods in July and August of 2022 along with some lower inflation periods that are more recent. Are we distorting the picture of inflation progress by mixing these two very different trends together?Well… that's something to be open-minded about. The other thing to remember is that while the core inflation rate has dropped by nearly half, measuring inflation at its three-month pace it has still only dropped to 5% not to 2% - free of the 'contamination' of averaging. And from December 2022 the core inflation rate not only has been stable but it has actually picked up slightly. Inflation options need to consider all these trends.These trends point to more good news in the making and that is simply to recognize that as we move ahead calculating year over year inflation rates the high inflation rates from early 2022 are going to fall out of the calculation and that means that the year-over-year inflation rates are going to fall faster than they have been falling. And that's good news.As I mentioned earlier, we can't be sure what inflation is going to do in the period ahead this means monetary policy wants to be careful; it does not want to assume that progress is going to continue at a strong pace nor does it want to think if progress is slow that the pace can't speed up either. Future policy needs to have some flexibility but it also needs to be realistic in what it can do and what it can expect.One important way to look at inflation is to recognize that year-over-year inflation is nothing more than the multiplied one-month percentage changes of the last 12 months. We currently have CPI data through April; at the time of the May inflation report, we'll have 11 of the same month-to-month changes that the April report has. May will drop the (known) oldest month-to-month change and it will add a new one (unknown) for the month of May. Mechanically that's why the year of inflation rate doesn't change very much from month-to-month. But we can see by looking at these monthly inflation data that we are losing that they are going to be relatively high numbers whereas the inflation numbers we're going to be gaining - if they are in keeping with the recent monthly trends we've had - are going to be much lower. So that's grounds for optimism and getting the year-over-year inflation rate lower. But are we going to get it low enough? Based on current trends the answer seems to be 'no.' And this is why I caution the Fed not to be too quick to pause. One of the worst things that monetary policy can do is to go through stop-go phases. Moves like that confuse markets because they have a harder time figuring out the speed at which monetary policy will progress in the future. So, let's look at these month-to-month inflation changes and see what we can learn about what inflation is doing now.Chart 4Monthly frequency distribution of inflation (Haver Analytics and FAO Economics)Chart four shows frequency distributions of monthly CPI percentage changes. They make the case that inflation is not yet under enough control for the Fed to slow its pace of tightening. This is a chart of the frequency distribution of monthly headline and core inflation changes for two different periods. The recent period spans the most recent 24 months. The other period is the benchmark 4 years before COVID struck during which inflation was low. The point of this chart is to look at the distribution or monthly changes in inflation during a period when inflation was low and compare it to the distribution that we have currently to see if the distribution of price changes for the core or headline CPI is beginning to look the way they have looked in the past during a broad period of price stability.The answer here is a rousing 'no.' The CPI core and the headline for the most recent 24 months show an extended frequency distribution to the right indicating that they have experienced some extreme the month-to-month changes in the headline and in the core CPI. During the four years of price stability before COVID struck we see the purple and the green series do not have extended frequency distributions to the right. The highest core increase during that four-year period was a gain of 0.3% month-to-month while the highest headline increase (the green series) was 0.5% month-to-month. Notice also during the period of price stability both the core and the headline series had observations at zero or even observations that were negative and there have been none of those over the past 24 months.These frequency distributions strongly suggest that we have not yet gotten back to a point of price stability and that, if we are going to get there, we'll have to have the period ahead appearing more like it was in the years prior to Covid.Chart 5Inflation density functions (Haver Analytics and FAO Economics)If you don't find the frequency distribution charts compelling or if you find them confusing, I have also included above the density charts for the various distributions. The density charts add up the cumulative frequencies from the lowest percentage increases to the highest going from left to right. For example, the purple line which is for core inflation shows us that during the period of price stability 95.8% of the core observations we're 0.2% per month or lower- WOW! The headline CPI had a little more gradualness to it. Still, 58% of its month-to-month percent changes were a 0.1% or lower. It did that over four years, and had one month-to-month gain as large as 0.5% on the month.When we compare these two distributions to what we see over the last 24 months, there is no comparison as the 24-month distributions stretch well into much higher month-to-month percent changes.One obvious criticism here is that I'm looking at 24-months which is a long period that has some of the higher monthly percent changes involved dating back to the time when inflation was more virulent. And I did that to try to gain more observations to look at in a 24-month period instead of just a 12-month period.Chart 6frequency distribution for last 12-months (Haver Analytics and FAO Economics)To assuage that criticism… Chart 6 shows the frequency distribution for the last 12 months for both the headline and the core. Both the headline in the core measures have some extreme observations that are still in the distribution and while they both have their modal (or, most frequent observation) at 0.4% (for the core the distribution is bimodal with 0.4% and 0.3% more frequent). That's still far too high for a 2% annual target. The distributions are still far too skewed to the right and only the headline has observations below 0.3% monthly. The Fed's inflation target is 2% and a steady diet of increases of 0.2% per month will set the annual rate for inflation at 2.4%. In CPI terms that gain is comparable to 2% on the PCE that the Fed targets since the CPI runs hotter than the PCE. However, the core doesn't have any increases that small over the last 12 months (the smallest is 0.3% or 3.7% annualized!).The facts argue for a stricter Fed, not a looser oneMy conclusion is that the facts argue for a stricter Fed not for a looser Fed, and not for a Fed that's going to take us into a pause early and hopes to glide into a soft landing on the further hope that in the soft landing inflation will continue to be reduced. History tells us that the world doesn't normally work that way. But now that we have had high inflation we know that inflation expectations are elevated. And we can see from the distribution of monthly changes that while we've made some progress on inflation, we are still not close to generating the kind of increases month-in and month-out that are going to give us the kind of price discipline that we seek.Everything that we know about economics suggests that we need to keep more pressure on the economy, on producers, and on consumers to reduce demand pressures and reduce prices to the Fed's target pace of 2% on the PCE.This analysis suggests that if the Fed loosens policy early inflation will again get out of control and while the markets may like the Fed backing off at least initially - if this analysis is correct - and if it turns out that inflation remains stubborn or backtracks, market euphoria will be short-lived and the next round of pain would be devastating.Catch-22So there's a little bit of Joseph Heller in all of this. Joseph Heller wrote the book \"Catch-22,\" which is a wonderful book that I highly recommend. The title of the book stems from a hypothetical army regulation that says that if you're crazy you can get a deferment to get out of your military service. However, there's a catch. And that catch, known as catch-22, is that if you request to be let out of your military service on the basis that you're crazy, then you're sane enough to know that you're really not crazy and the clause no longer applies to you.I see this same sort of self-undermining logic in the belief that a soft-landing is the right course of action. Many want the economy to go back to normal and there was a long period of price stability before Covid. Many people simply assume that if the Fed just lets interest rates go back down to normal, inflation will go back to normal and everything will be fine and 'normal.' But the world has changed. COVID changed the world and what's normal has changed too.The supply chains shifted. Labor market participation rates have shifted. And, most of all, inflation has shifted and inflation psychology has shifted. There is no reason to think anything is going to go back to the way it was because we're just not there anymore. That world, that environment, those conditions, no longer exist.I worry… and you should, tooThis is why I worry about the Fed not having staying power and not raising rates enough. I believe it has already damaged its reputation by denying inflation and by procrastinating on needed policy moves that let inflation climb even higher. I don't know what will happen if it makes that same mistake again with inflation already this high. And this is not just simply a concern about the Fed. It's also a concern about what it will mean for Fed policy, and for markets: for the bond market, for stocks, for the dollar, for gold, for commodities, and for everything. Fed policy desperately needs to restore price stability. Financial policy needs an anchor. The Fed can't pull that anchor up and trust that the currents will take us where it wants us to go. Every investor needs to be aware of this 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