Inflation

Powell signals bigger hikes are back

Jerome Powell’s semi-annual monetary policy testimony before the Senate Banking Committee was an unsparing rhetorical reset.

Short-term bonds are having a terrible month

The month of February 2023 will be recorded across fixed-income trading floors as an unmitigated bloodbath for short-term sovereign debt.

Last year's inflation just got rewritten

On 10 February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its routine annual seasonal revisions to the consumer price index, and in doing so, quietly rewrote the monetary history of late 2022.

The inflation number the Fed secretly cares about

The December consumer price index confirmed that headline US inflation is descending from its summer summit, printing at 6.5 per cent year-on-year.

China reopens, and the world gets a new inflation problem

The western narrative that China's eventual retreat from zero-Covid would deliver an unalloyed disinflationary impulse to the global economy is about to collide with industrial reality.

Cyber Monday: What the discounts say about inflation

The bond market is screaming recession

For more than four decades, the slope of the US sovereign yield curve has served as the financial markets' most reliable predictive mechanism for the business cycle.

Rents are already falling. Official data hasn't noticed

Among the many statistical anomalies embedded in the US macroeconomic dashboard, none is currently creating more analytical distortion than the housing component of the consumer price index.

One good inflation report does not make a trend

The release of the October consumer price index on 10 November ignited the most ferocious global asset rally of the year.

The inflation the Fed can't fix: your haircut and your dentist

Central bankers like to project an image of omnipotent precision, as though adjusting the cost of overnight money can recalibrate every price tag in the modern economy.

Don't bet on inflation falling just because the maths says so

The celebratory mood across equity trading desks relies on mistaking a statistical deceleration for an economic armistice.