MacroScope

For a central bank that looks certain to bust its 2 percent inflation target for most of the time between now and the London 2012 Olympics, there is still a lot of uncertainty out there.

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King referred to “uncertain” or “uncertainty” about the outlook five times at the May quarterly Inflation Report press conference according to the bank’s transcript, and the latest one didn’t seem much more confident in tone.

“There is great uncertainty about the outlook for both the United States and our most important trading partner, the euro area,” King said in his opening remarks before taking questions from reporters.

Later on, he proclaimed that the recovery period “will take several years before we adjust back to anything we can call remotely normal.”

But just how uncertain is the BoE?

George Buckley, chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank, has come up with a revealing graph measuring the width of the BoE’s “fan charts”, which identify the distribution of probable outcomes in their quarterly GDP forecast, against the market’s main volatility measure, the VIX. They appear to track each other rather closely.

The latest Reuters quarterly economic outlook, based on surveys of more than 600 economists across Asia, Europe and North America smells a bit of danger.

Growth is looking very uneven. Inflation is a worry here but not there. Unemployment looks to remain perilously high.

It also has a whiff of the surveys Reuters conducted a few years ago just before the Great Recession set in, when economists were saying we’d all muddle through with a bit of a slowdown and don’t worry about a thing. How wrong they got that one.

While most of the developed world frets about deflation, in Britain, inflation just won’t quit. 

The Bank of England has been forecasting a sharp fall in consumer price inflation for about as long as Britons have hoped for a summer of uninterrupted sunshine. But at least Britons are still betting on a fair amount of rain. 

UK inflation was 3.2 percent in June, a slight fall from the month before, but still 1.2 percentage points above the central bank’s target rate. 

What do the price of infants’ clothing and alcohol have in common? They are “sticky prices” that rarely change.

Federal Reserve researchers Michael Bryan and Brent Meyer say these sticky prices may be a better indicator for where inflation is heading.

“While a sticky price may not be as responsive to economic conditions as a flexible price, it may do a better job of incorporating inflation expectations. Since price setters understand that it will be costly to change prices, they will want their price decisions to account for inflation over the periods between their infrequent price changes,” the researchers wrote in a study published on the Cleveland Fed’s website.

How high or low are the public’s expectations for future inflation? It depends on how you ask the question, according to New York Fed research.
The closely-watched Michigan Survey of Consumers asks questions about “prices in general” to measure expected and perceived inflation.
But New York Fed researchers found survey questions that use the word ‘prices’ instead of ‘inflation rate’  “may bias expectations upwards.”
Responses to questions about “prices in general,” were significantly higher than responses for “the rate of inflation” when asking for expectations of the next 12 months, they found.
Why?  Questions that used the word ‘prices’  “focused respondents relatively more on personal price experiences and elicited expectations that were more strongly correlate to the expected price increases for food and transportation,” the researchers wrote.
The Federal Reserve keeps a close eye on inflation expectations, as they can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Read the full report here

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King was on good form when he addressed the Royal Society – Britain’s oldest scientific discussion club – on the vexing issue of communicating complex forecasts to the great unwashed.

Aside from his usual moan about the media’s desire to reduce the BoE’s beautiful but baffling ‘fan charts’ of inflation forecasts to one or two numbers, he made a rare and welcome admission that in past years the central bank had not done as well as it could have to flag up the risk that a financial crisis was about to happen.

The BoE’s financial stability reports – like those from many other central banks – sometimes sounded as if they were crying wolf in the years running up to the credit crunch by warning of pretty much every risk to markets short of Martian invasion.

Inflation may not be at the forefront of worries about economy for now, but it’s certainly in the back of many investors’ minds. Not that anyone thinks price increases will be reinforced by the labor market, as per the old “wage-push” theory. A new report from the International Labor Organization showed that wage growth continued to decline around the world in 2008, falling to 1.4 percent last year from 4.3 percent in 2007. The UN group also suggested things have gotten worse this year.

The picture on wages is likely to get worse in 2009 – despite the beginning of a possible economic recovery.   Compared to the annual average of 2008, the real wages in the first quarter of 2009 fell in more than half of the 35 countries for which recent data is available.   The downward trend in wages raises some questions about the extent to which the consumption of workers and their families will be able to sustain aggregate demand for economic production once the effects of government rescue packages peter out.

This trend has not, however, succeeded in calming those spooked by unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus from governments and central banks around the world. Indeed, inflation-hedging is creating market niches all of its own. The Treasury, for instance, is expected to bring back 30-year Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, or TIPS, as part of its quarterly refunding announcement on Wednesday. Gorge Goncalves at Cantor Fitzgerald notes:

David Bowers, the one-time Merrill Lynch strategist who now co-drives consultancy Absolute Strategy Research, reckons policymakers and financial analysts have got it wrong about the credit crunch. It is not a consumer event, he says, it is a corporate one.

As evidence, Bowers’ ASR notes that of the roughly 4 percent decline in U.S. economic growth this year, around 85 percent can be attributed to a decline in the capex and inventory contribution. A similar picture can be found in the euro zone — where some  60 percent of a near 5 percent decline is from corporate. There is less of a case in Japan, but at roughly 40 percent of a more than 6 percent decline it is still a sizeabe chunk.

Bowers believes this huge decline is going to force companies to resume output because there will be shortages.  On the one hand, this will lead to improved corporate cash flows, narrrowing credit spreads. On the other a combination of inventory shortages, supply chain bottlenecks and base effects suggest to ASR that inflation is on the way.

Professor Charles Goodhart of the London School of Economics explains the difference between inflation targeting and price level targeting in the lobby of Jackson Lake Lodge after taking part in an animated discussion of whether central banks should target price levels rather than inflation.

A paper University of California, Santa Cruz economist Carl Walsh presented at the Federal Reserve’s annual mountain retreat suggested that one lesson from the recent financial crisis is that central banks would benefit from the greater flexibility that price level targeting might give them.

A former Fed governor,  Frederic Mishkin, said that while in theory price level targeting may sound attractive, in actual practice it is more difficult to use effectively. One difficulty he cited was in explaining to consumers how it works. 

Five things to think about this week:

APPETITE TO CHASE? 
- Equity bulls have managed to retain the upper hand so far and the MSCI world index is up almost 50 percent from its March lows. However, earnings may need to show signs of rebounding for the rally's momentum to be sustained. Even those looking for further equity gains think the rise in stock prices will lag that in earnings once the earnings recovery gets underway, as was the case in past cycles. The symmetry/asymmetry of market reaction to data this week -- as much from China as from the major developed economies -- will show how much appetite there is to keep chasing the rally higher. 

TAKING CONSUMERS' PULSE 
- A better picture of the health of the consumer will emerge this week as U.S. retailers' earnings coincides with the release of U.S. July retail sales data and the UK BRC retail survey comes out on the other side of the Atlantic. With joblessness still rising, the reports will show how willing households are to spend and whether deep discounts, which eat into retailers' profit margins, are the only thing that will tempt them to shop -- both key issues for the macroeconomic and corporate outlook. 

CENTRAL BANK WATCH 
- After last week's Bank of England surprise, all eyes turn to what sort of signals the U.S. Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan will send on the outlook for their respective economies and QE programmes. After the BOE's expansion of its QE programme the short sterling strip repriced how soon UK rates would rise. But the broader trend recently in the U.S., euro zone and the UK has been to discount rate rises in 2010 -- and possibly as soon as this year in Australia. Benchmark interbank euro rates have risen for the first time in two months, and central bankers everywhere, including China, face the delicate balancing act of managing monetary tightening expectations in the months ahead.