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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Real Man who wrote (58477)	10/17/2016 11:25:59 AM
From: ggersh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71445

From what I read about this, it's time to start initiating your backup plans It appears as if our esteemed Fed head has no clue about inflation. federalreserve.gov Inflation Dynamics My fourth question goes to the heart of monetary policy: What determines inflation? From my perspective, the standard framework for thinking about inflation dynamics used by central bank economists and others prior to the financial crisis remains conceptually useful today. A simple description of this framework might go something like this:16 Inflation is characterized by an underlying trend that has been essentially constant since the mid-1990s; previously, this trend seemed to drift over time, influenced by actual past inflation or other economic conditions. Theory and evidence suggest that this trend is strongly influenced by inflation expectations that, in turn, depend on monetary policy. In particular, the remarkable stability of various measures of expected inflation in recent years presumably represents the fruits of the Federal Reserve's sustained efforts since the early 1980s to bring down and then stabilize inflation at a low level. The anchoring of inflation expectations that has resulted from this policy does not, however, prevent actual inflation from fluctuating from year to year in response to the temporary influence of movements in energy prices and other disturbances. In addition, inflation will tend to run above or below its underlying trend to the extent that resource utilization--which may serve as an indicator of firms' marginal costs--is persistently high or low.17 While this general framework for thinking about the inflation process remains useful, questions about some of its quantitative features have arisen in the wake of the Great Recession and the subsequent slow recovery. For example, the influence of labor market conditions on inflation in recent years seems to be weaker than had been commonly thought prior to the financial crisis. Although inflation fell during the recession, the decline was quite modest given how high unemployment rose; likewise, wages and prices rose comparatively little as the labor market gradually recovered. Whether this reduction in sensitivity was somehow caused by the recession or instead pre-dated it and was merely revealed under extreme conditions is unclear.18 Either way, the underlying cause is unknown. Does the reduced sensitivity reflect structural changes, such as globalization or a greater role for intangible capital in production that have reduced the importance of cyclical swings in domestic activity for firms' marginal costs and pricing power? Or does it perhaps reflect the well-documented reluctance--or, alternatively, limited ability--of firms to cut the nominal wages of their employees, which could help to explain the relatively moderate movements in inflation we saw during and after the recession?19 Another gap in our knowledge about the nature of the inflation process concerns expectations. Although many theoretical models suggest that actual inflation should be most closely related to short-run inflation expectations, as an empirical matter, measures of long-run expectations appear to explain the data better.20 Yet another unresolved issue concerns whose expectations--those of consumers, firms, or investors--are most relevant for wage and price setting, a point on which theory provides no clear-cut guidance. More generally, the precise manner in which expectations influence inflation deserves further study.21